Virtualization

As enterprises grow, IT organizations must rapidly add computing capacity - often in the form of new servers with different operating environments. The resulting server sprawl is costly in terms of capital and personnel needed to operate, manage, and upgrade new servers.

Server consolidation with VMware or Microsoft software provides a solution for these challenges. Virtual infrastructure enables unprecedented levels of workload isolation and granular resource control for all of the system's computing and I/O resources. Virtual Infrastructure integrates well with existing system management software and improves return on investment in shared storage. By consolidating physical systems in the data center onto servers with virtualized infrastructures, enterprises experience:

· Lower hardware acquisition and maintenance costs               

· Consolidation of idle system resources

· Increased operational efficiency

· Cost-effective and consistent production environments

 

 IT Infrastructure applications such as file and print servers, web servers, and DNS/ DHCP servers are prime candidates for virtualization and associated consolidation.  Although most of these applications only utilize 10-15% of their servers’ capacity, architectural, security, and compatibility issues lead to recommendations to dedicate a separate physical platform to each of these applications. Managing, patching, and securing these servers takes valuable IT time. In addition, proliferation of physical servers drives up operational costs for facilities, power, and cooling. Virtualization allows enterprises to realize:

· A consolidation ratio of 4 workloads per CPU or higher

· Lower capital and operational costs

· Dramatic improvements in server management

· Infrastructure which is more robust and disaster resistant

 

Software Development Optimization
Technology mangers are under constant pressure to shorten the cycle for enterprise application development and deployment. Migrating the development and testing environments to virtual infrastructure results in immediate improvement in time to market and lower defect levels.  Virtualization software encapsulates complete test platform applications and data into files. Furthermore, virtualized infrastructure has many functions specifically designed for optimizing test and development environments - from system snapshot to support for system level debugging. With Virtualization software, enterprise development organizations can:

· Partition a single physical platform into dozens of isolated development environments

· Copy exact multi-module production environment into virtual machines for testing

· Share complete environments among different teams

· Eliminate repetitive configuration tasks from development and testing cycles

· Automate many testing sequences that previously required manual intervention

· Simulate complex networked applications on a single physical platform

 

Business Continuity

Each year hundreds of data centers worldwide will experience significant service interruptions. These businesses will be threatened by problems ranging from user errors to viruses, to hardware failures and natural disasters. Business Continuity is now at the forefront of corporate IT strategies and has gained visibility throughout all levels of management up to the CEO. Elements of a successful business continuity strategy include:

· Application availability planning

· Preventive measures including monitoring and platform redundancy

· Data Protection

· Disaster recovery strategy

 

Effective personnel plans:

Using virtualized infrastructure, IT managers can improve all aspects of business continuity, such as:

· Faster and less expensive disaster recovery due to hardware independence between primary and failover servers

· Elimination of scheduled hardware downtime and dramatic reduction in scheduled software downtime

· Single point of control for managing all the virtual machines and monitoring their host machines

· Encapsulation of complete machines into files for capture and recovery

· Simplified and repeatable automated processes

 

Demo: VMware Virtual Infrastructure

 

 

 

 

Demo: VMware Virtual Infrastructure