Testing a new release of business-critical software inside a sandboxed virtual machine is a common best practice before rolling the update into a live production environment. Which statement best describes how this approach affects the possibility of production downtime?
It requires a dedicated physical server for each virtual machine to avoid resource contention during testing.
It completely eliminates the risk of downtime because the software is fully validated in a virtual environment.
It guarantees identical performance metrics in production because the virtual machine uses the same virtualized hardware.
It reduces the likelihood of downtime but cannot remove all risk because unforeseen issues may still surface after deployment.
Running the update in a virtual machine first greatly reduces the likelihood of production downtime because bugs can be discovered in an isolated sandbox. Nevertheless, differences between the test VM and the real production stack, as well as unavoidable hardware or network failures, mean that some risk of an outage still remains. Virtual machines minimize-but never completely eliminate-potential service disruption in production. The other options either overstate what virtualization can promise or describe requirements that are not inherent to using VMs for testing.
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