Why it matters
A server that was bought for one job ends up running five. Nobody knows what is on it, the disks are full, and the last backup was a copy to a USB drive that has since been used for something else.
Virtualization separates the machine from the work it does. A virtual machine can be backed up whole, restored whole, and moved to new hardware without reinstalling anything.
How we work
We size the hardware for the next three years, not for the demo. We deploy Proxmox, VMware or Hyper-V depending on what you already have and what your software vendors support. Existing servers are migrated into virtual machines and the old hardware is retired only after the new one has run for a while.
Every virtual machine is backed up, and the restore is tested and written down. The hosts, the storage and each machine go under monitoring.