Introduction to Virtualization E-book, Chapter 3: Virtualizing A Test And Development Lab

Despite many constraints, many businesses have moved forward with system consolidation projects to increase resource utilization and decrease costs and physical server footprints. Those organizations realize the gains through server virtualization projects-consolidating physical servers into virtual machines (VMs) running on host servers.
While organizations tend to proceed with these projects for production environments, few realize how useful and successful these physical consolidation projects can be for testing and training, as well as for development and other volatile IT environments. This chapter highlights some of the benefits of consolidating your test and development environments through virtualization, including costs savings, accelerated time to deployment and system consistency throughout your environment.