'Paper and Pencil' is a Malaysia-based online stationery store selling a full range of stationery and office supplies. Their office supplies include stationery from papers, files, pen and pencils to staplers, glues, tapes and more such as office furniture, IT equipment for home and small office, and printing solutions. 'Paper and Pencil' has a series of servers purchased in mid-2017 that has started to show problems being old. Expired warranties and the servers often crashing had made the IT department to look for self-maintenance. With limited IT budgets and staff especially with the challenging changing economic landscape, the 'Paper and Pencil' stationery retailer has challenges to extend the working life of the existing servers. They look for longer server refresh cycles and fewer deployments in terms of hardware and software infrastructure. The 'Paper and Pencil' stationery retailer with a limited budget have the option of buying some new servers. The 'Paper and Pencil' retailer apart from server consolidation to save cost and maintenance wishes to have more centralized control over the applications and desktops it has over the various locations across Malaysia and maximize the organizations investment in IT hardware.

a) Analyse the given scenario and briefly discuss how and by what means virtualization can help to overcome the challenge in terms of server consolidation. Also, discuss how 'Paper and Pencil' online stationery store could have more centralized control over the application and desktops and can maximize its IT hardware infrastructure investment.

b) Discuss the general benefits of desktop virtualization.