VmWare - Business Saviour

VMware is a tool which allows the virtualization of physical machines. Think of your laptop, for example, that's a physical machine i.e. you can touch it, pick it up and take it away.

With VMware you can take a 'snapshot' of your laptop and run it as a virtual machine on another computer. The 'snapshot' reduces your system to a series of files and definitions.

An excellent use is in the provision of disaster recovery services.

By virtualizing one or more servers and keeping the images and backup data at a recovery site it is very easy to get systems back on-line rapidly.

One of the reasons that this is so much simpler than traditional restoration is that the virtual machine is hardware independent.

There is, therefore, no need to restore to a system with the same hardware configuration, this is all handled by VMware.

You need only ensure that the hardware is sufficiently powerful to do the job - more.