VMWare Virtual Infrastructure solutions

Virtualisation Technology and VMware

Virtualisation Technology Explained

The VMware Virtual Infrastructure is a software abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilisation and flexibility. VMware Virtual Infrastructure enables the creation of multiple secure virtual machines on one physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (eg, RAM, CPU, NIC, etc) upon which an operating system (OS) and applications are loaded. The OS sees a consistent, normalised set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components. Virtualisation is a form of partitioning tat allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating system to run in isolation, side by side on the same physical machine. Virtual machines are encapsulated into files, making it possible rapidly to save, copy and provision a virtual machine. Full systems (fully configured applications, operating systems, BIOS and virtual hardware) can now be moved, within seconds, from one physical server to another for zero-downtime maintenance and continuous workload consolidation.

Benefits of Virtualisation

Partitioning

v Multiple applications and operating systems can be supported within a single physical system.

v Servers can be consolidated in virtual machines on either a scale-up or scale-out architecture.

v Computing resources are treated as a uniform pool

Isolation

v Virtual machines are completely isolated from the host machine and other virtual machines. If a virtual machine crashes, all others are unaffected.

v Data does not leak across virtual machines and applications can only communicate over configured network connections.

Encapsulation

v Complete virtual machine environment is saved as a single file; easy to back up, move and copy.

v Standardised virtualised hardware is presented to the application, guaranteeing compatibility.

VMware Product Overview

VMware ESX Server Datacentre-Class Virtual Infrastructure with VMware Virtual SMP for scaling on Multiprocessor Intel hardware

v Implement server consolidation.

v Deliver high availability and guarantee service levels.

v Scale hardware and software infrastructure.

v Increase capacity without adding new systems.

v Consolidate applications and servers on blades.

VMware GSX Server Enterprise-Class Virtual Infrastructure for Intel-based Servers

v Implement server consolidation in development and testing and production environments.

v Migrate legacy servers to newer hardware.

v Consolidate departmental applications.

v Deliver high availability.

v Provision serves rapidly.

VMware P2V Assistant Enterprise-Class Tool for Physical to Virtual Machine Migration

v Transform an image of an existing physical system into a VMware virtual machine to simplify server consolidation and the adoption of a virtual infrastructure. Migrate legacy servers to newer hardware without having to re-install the applications.

v Consolidate the production servers with minimal risk and downtime.

v Create a virtual copy of a production environment for pre-deployment testing and contingency planning.

VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node Datacentre-Class Virtual Infrastructure Software Enabling a Central Point of Control for your Data Centre’s Virtual Computing Resources

v Dynamically move workloads across distributed physical servers.

v Streamline server provisioning and management.

v Monitor system availability and performance.

v Manage distributed servers as a single pool of resources.

Production Server Consolidation

Ask yourself…	How VMware can help...
Q: Are your business units pressuring you to deploy more servers than you can manage?	v Effectively manage existing applications and quickly deploy new applications on or ahead of schedule, accelerating time to market
Q: Do you need to meet incremental demands on your IT organisation without increase in budget?	v Maximise server resource utilisation and dramatically reduce hardware and software costs
Q: Are you currently involved in planning a server consolidation project?	v VMware easily converts physical servers to virtual servers using P2V migration tools
Q: Do you have a strategy in place for availability and disaster recovery of your infrastructure?	v Increase quality and reliability of production environments. Over 80% of VMware customers deploy in production environments
Q: Are you unhappy with your ability to respond to your business needs for the provisioning of new servers?	v Instantly provision new servers from standardised templates. Reduce ROI threshold for new projects
Q: Do you need to guarantee resource levels to the applications you host?	v Consider VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) with ESX Server for consolidating mission-critical and Datacentre applications. Consider VMware GSX Server or VMware ESX Server for consolidating departmental applications

Server Consolidation Solution Benefits

v Increased operational efficiency by improving system management and reducing system complexity.

v Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by maximising server utilisation and uptime.

v Reduced acquisition costs by 63%.

v Reduced annual maintenance and operational costs by 66%.

v Improved resource management by allowing every virtual server to obtain guaranteed CPU, memory, disk I/O and network resources.

v Fewer service interruptions by moving virtual serves across a pool of machines using VMotion.

Disaster Recovery

Ask yourself…	How VMware can help...
Q: Are you able to meet your recovery time objectives consistently?	v Dramatically reduce Time To Recovery (TTR) in a disaster
Q: Do you plan to implement a business continuity plan in your IT organisation in the next 12 months?	v Improve cost-effectiveness of disaster recovery plans by reducing server requirements and tools/processes that IT needs to learn
Q: Have you excluded important applications from your disaster recovery plan because of complexity and costs?	v Increase application coverage in disaster recovery plans by taking advantage of a reliable and easy-to-automate recovery solution
Q: Are hardware issues limiting your ability to implement a comprehensive business continuity plan?	v Flexibility to restore an application running in a virtual server to any hardware – VMware virtual servers are hardware independent
Q: Are you interested in application availability and zero downtime maintenance?	v Consider VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) with ESX Server

Disaster Recovery Solution Benefits

v Application and hardware independent disaster recovery plans.

v Enjoy more complete disaster recovery plans by increasing application coverage, recovery testing and process automation.

v Reduced hardware and maintenance costs by 70% since identical hardware is not required for reliable recovery.

v Faster and more efficient disaster recovery of applications and data encapsulated into virtual machines.

v Consolidation of failover hardware with little or no reduction in level of protection.

High Availability (HA)

Ask yourself…	How VMware can help...
Q: Are you able to meet your application availability objectives consistently?	v Meet availability objectives by keeping backup copies of critical server virtual machines in suspended state, ready to take over from a failed primary server
Q: Do you plan to implement a business continuity plan in your IT organisation in the next 12 months?	v Improve cost-effectiveness of disaster recovery plans by reducing server requirements and tools/processes that IT needs to learn
Q: Have you excluded important applications from your HA plan because of costs?	v Cover mission-critical and mid-tier applications and services by mirroring applications on shared servers, securely and at lower cost
Q: Is increasing SLA and application availability a priority for your organisation?	v Perform zero-downtime maintenance on live systems without interrupting service
Q: Have you been unable to implement clustering or HA because of a lack of facilities and power resources?	v Drive down TCO by leveraging existing high availability and failover clustering software to reduce hardware redundancy from having one stand-by server for each mission-critical application server to having one or two standby severs for the entire datacentre
Q: Would eliminating maintenance windows be of value to your organisation?	v Consider VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) with ESX Server

High Availability Solution Benefits

v Maximum server uptime and increased productivity and satisfaction of end users.

v Increased application and service coverage.

v Reduced hardware redundancy by running on many-to-one clusters and clustering between physical and virtual machines.

v Save 26% on the acquisition costs.

v Save 45% on the maintenance costs.

v Save 72% on the operational costs.

v Recovery of failed systems in seconds not hours.

Development and Test – Infrastructure

Ask yourself…	How VMware can help...
Q: Are you unhappy with your ability to respond to your developers’ needs for the provisioning of new test servers and distributed services and to reproduce field environments?	v Rapidly provision and de-provision new development and test servers, using standardised templates and increase capacity without adding hardware
Q: Are you able to resource the test matrices for all desired options in server platforms, middleware and database versions, and operating systems?	v Store libraries of test machines without various OS combinations and applications as virtual machine files
Q: Is the software distribution/delivery from QA to developers, from support to QA and from QA to production server administration as efficient as it could be?	v Distribute snapshots of virtual machines wit the complete application state between development, QA and support teams
Q: Do you have many applications that get inadequate pre-deployment testing because there are no server resources available?	v Consolidate applications and infrastructure services onto fewer highly scalable, highly reliable enterprise-class servers
Q: Do you need to automate repetitive tests and reduce test set-up time?	v Consider VMware Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) with GSX Server or ESX Server

Development and Test Solution Benefits – Infrastructure

v Improved quality and reduced risk of rolling out new applications by shortening development cycles and doing more rigorous testing.

v Reduced provisioning times for new applications to tens of seconds instead of hours or days.

v Faster development cycles and reduced configuration time for complex testing projects by enabling centralised libraries of virtual test environments.

v Lower TCO and simplified server management while cost-justifying higher quality server hardware. Reduced development system acquisition costs by 48%.

Call Transam Microsystems Ltd 020 7837 4050 www.transam.co.uk