Virtualization
Virtualize for Efficiency, Higher Availability and Lower Costs
Virtualization is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and agility—not just for large enterprises, but for small and midsize businesses too.
VMware virtualization lets you:
- Run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server.
- Consolidate hardware to get vastly higher productivity from fewer servers.
- Save 50 percent or more on overall IT costs.
- Speed up and simplify IT management, maintenance, and the deployment of new applications.
VMware Virtualization
- Reduce capital and operational costs by increasing energy efficiency and using less hardware with server consolidation.
- Enhance business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities for your virtualized infrastructure. Virtualize business critical applications and databases (Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, SAP Sybase, SAP Business Suite, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SAP) for the highest SLAs and top performance.
- Gain policy-based automation and ensure compliance and performance with a zero-touch infrastructure using VMware vRealize™ Operations™ for virtualization management.
See more at: http://www.vmware.com/ap/virtualization/#sthash.XGalA895.dpuf
Server Virtualization
Abstracting the operating system and applications from the physical hardware gives you a more cost-efficient, agile and simplified server environment. Using server virtualization, multiple operating systems can run on a single physical server as virtual machines, each with access to the underlying server's computing resources. Most servers operate at less than 15 percent of capacity, leading to server sprawl and complexity. Server virtualization addresses these inefficiencies.
VMware vSphere offers a complete server virtualization platform that delivers: 80 percent greater utilization of server resources Up to 50 percent savings in capital and operating costs 10:1 or better server consolidation ratio
Since virtualized infrastructure has unique management needs, VMware offers vSphere with Operations Management, which delivers vSphere optimized with critical capacity and performance management capabilities. It is designed for businesses of all sizes to run applications at high service levels and maximize hardware savings through even higher capacity utilization and consolidation ratios.
Benefits of virtualization are nothing short of dramatic.
Network Virtualization
Network virtualization is the complete reproduction of a physical network in software. Virtual networks offer the same features and guarantees of a physical network with the operational benefits and hardware independence of virtualization—rapid provisioning, non-disruptive deployment, automated maintenance, and support for both legacy and new applications.
Presents logical networking devices and services—logical ports, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs and more—to connected workloads. Applications run on the virtual network exactly the same as if on a physical network.
With software-defined networking, virtualization principles are applied to network resources, abstracting, pooling and automating them to transcend the limitations of rigid physical architectures.
Network services are assigned to each application and remain with it, elastically adapting to its changing requirements.
Software-defined networking has many benefits:
Desktop Virtualization
Deploying desktops as a managed service gives you the opportunity to respond quicker to changing needs and opportunities. You can reduce costs and increase service by quickly and easily delivering virtualized desktops and applications to branch offices, outsourced and offshore employees and mobile workers on iPad and Android tablets. VMware desktop solutions are scalable, consistent, fully secure and highly available to ensure maximum uptime and productivity.
Application Virtualization
In order to maintain QoS and SLA for Tier 1 business applications in virtual environments, IT organizations must focus on the virtualization components of the project, the management and monitoring of virtualized business applications, and on maintaining corporate guidelines for business continuity and disaster recovery. With the VMware Tier 1 Application Virtualization solution built on VMware vCloud Suite®, you can enhance the quality of IT services delivered, while simplifying your infrastructure, maximizing efficiency and eliminating costly over-provisioning. Learn more about application virtualization.
Storage Virtualization
Huge data volumes and real-time applications are pushing storage demands to new levels. As the leader in hyper-converged software-defined storage for virtual environments, VMware Virtual SAN™ applies the principles of VMware's Software-Defined Data Center to storage by abstracting the disks and flash drives inside your servers, combining them into high-performance storage pools, and delivering them as software.
Virtual SAN offers simplified, policy-based provisioning, and it’s integrated with the vSphere web client, so you can:
- Easily manage both compute and storage through a single interface.
- Significantly improve storage resource utilization and flexibility.
- Simplify OS patching and driver requirements, regardless of storage topology.
- Increase application uptime and simplify day-to-day operations.
- Leverage and complement your existing storage infrastructure.
Learn more about storage virtualization. See more at:http://www.vmware.com/ap/virtualization/#sthash.XGalA895.dpuf
Virtualization Advantages
By running multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical server, virtualization lets you
- Reduce costs while increasing the efficiency and utilization of your existing x86 hardware.
- Reduce capital and operating costs. Server consolidation lets you get more out of your existing hardware by running multiple virtual machines (VM) on a single physical server. Fewer servers means lower capital and operating costs. For the most cost savings, make sure you go with a virtualization solution that has the highest VM density per host.
- Deliver high application availability. Integrated availability and fault tolerance protects all your virtualized applications. Should a node or server ever fail, all its VMs are automatically restarted or continued on another machine, with no downtime or data loss?
- Improve business continuity. Virtualization makes it easier to survive unplanned potential IT disasters. You can move VMs from one server to another in a different location.
- Increase IT productivity. Streamlined and automated management tasks mean you’ll spend less time on maintenance and more time on innovation.
- Improve responsiveness. Virtualization lets your business scale rapidly because you can deploy desktops, applications and servers quickly and flexibly.
How Virtualization Works
What is a Virtual Machine?
The heart of virtualization is the “virtual machine” (VM), a tightly isolated software container with an operating system and application inside. Because each virtual machine is completely separate and independent, many of them can run simultaneously on a single computer. A thin layer of software called a hypervisor decouples the virtual machines from the host and dynamically allocates computing resources to each virtual machine as needed.
This architecture redefines your computing equation and delivers:
Many applications on each server. As each virtual machine encapsulates an entire machine, many applications and operating systems can run on a single host at the same time.
Maximum server utilization, minimum server count. Every physical machine is used to its full capacity, allowing you to significantly reduce costs by deploying fewer servers overall.
Faster, easier application and resource provisioning. As self-contained software files, virtual machines can be manipulated with copy-and-paste ease. Virtual machines can even be transferred from one physical server to another while running, via a process known as live migration. You can also virtualize business-critical apps to improve performance, reliability, scalability and reduce costs.
Levels of Virtualization
- Server Consolidation
- Desktop Virtualization
- Software-Defined Data Center
Virtualizing one or two servers is just the beginning. The next step is to aggregate a server cluster into a single consolidated resource. For example, instead of 20 servers running at 15 percent of capacity each, you can reduce your hardware count—and associated costs—to four servers, each performing at 80 percent.
VMware enables you to deliver secure virtual desktops as a managed service for remote and branch office employees. Our virtual desktop solutions increase business flexibility, simplify management and reduce your costs.
Ultimately, you can attain the full efficiency and agility of cloud computing by virtualizing, pooling and automating all data center resources—servers, storage, networking, security and availability—and tying everything together with policy-based provisioning and automated operations management. The result is a Software-Defined Data Center where:
- Capacity expands and contracts as needed.
- Applications can be provisioned on-demand.
- Every application is assured of the right levels of performance, compliance and security.
- IT can shift resources and budget away from infrastructure management and maintenance, toward creating innovations that give your company an edge.