I'm not sure exactly what your customers need, but if for example your customer is an enormous travel agency, they might need more server resources around the holiday seasons than the rest of the year. With virtual machines, they can easily scale up and down their infrastructure, and not have to pay for hardware that is basically not doing anything off-season, allowing you to sell the spare processing power on those idle servers to other customers, and reduce costs for both your company and your customers.
Setting up several virtual machines might not be super relevant for all situations and customers, but for example: If you have one rack server with two processors that have 8 cores each, and a total of 48 GB of RAM and you need to run a database server or two, a web server or two, maybe a domain name server, you *could* run all these servers on one single operating system that had access to all 16 cores and 48 gigs of RAM. However, if there is a security issue in for example one of the database programs, that could let an intruder gain access over all the other services on that machine as well.
If you instead had 3 virtual machines on that single physical machine, you could reserve 6 cores and 16 GB RAM to one VM that handled all the databases, 6 cores and 10 GB to the web servers, and run the rest of the services on a VM that was given the remaining resources, even if someone managed to break into the database servers, they would be unable to get into the other two machines, or any of the services running on them. Also, if one of the database applications simply had a sort of a bug that would for no apparent reason cause system instability, that instability would be contained within the virtual machine it was running in, and not affect the rest of the hardware where the other services were running. It would be easier to see what caused the issue, and easier and faster to fix it.
The cloud is again sort of a fuzzy term. If a customer uses a datacenter for in example citrix applications that their users can access from any device they might have, whether it be in their homes or at work or on the go, this is already technically "the cloud", no matter how the actual server setup that allows for this is configured. When I use dropbox or google drive on my different devices, this is also using "the cloud", even if it is a very different type of service.
I also don't really work with this sort of stuff. I just play around with virtual machines on my home computer. I've got like two different VMs running on my desktop computer now, in addition to my normal windows 7 that i do most stuff in. I also have 5 inactive virtual machines all with different operating systems on that i can boot up anytime i need them. I personally use them to test out new things without risking breaking my main system
For example, I use my Linux VM to run linux applications that do not work on Windows, even if that linux VM is running inside windows. This isn't exactly how VMs are used in enterprise situations, however. You don't run the VMs "inside" a normal windows installation for the most part. Instead you use a very specialized OS that is built for the sole purpose of hosting other, more fully featured operating systems. These operating systems are known as "hypervisors" rather than OSes.
This is how it looks when you do it on a desktop pc. it can be pretty fun
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2023.39.11.png
None of those other two operating systems are able to interact with my main windows. Viruses that might infect my windows XP on the right side have no way of getting into my main windows installation. Unless I do something really dumb.
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