Building the Virtualized Enterprise
Executive Summary
IT organizations are still grappling with the legacy of the IT explosion of the 1990s, which left many of them with high costs, slow response times, and an inconsistently managed infrastructure. Today, IT organizations that want to give their enterprise a sustainable competitive advantage need to:
- Reduce infrastructure costs through more efficient use of resources.
- Respond faster to business needs so projects get deployed more rapidly.
- Increase the consistency and predictability of operations.
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This paper will clarify how adopting VMware infrastructure – the combination of server, storage and networking virtualization technologies — as a fundamental IT strategy helps organizations to achieve these goals.
VMware Infrastructure allows IT teams to continuously consolidate workloads to maximize server utilization and decrease operational costs. It allows system administrators to manage a higher number of servers, and it delivers more flexibility and responsiveness in provisioning new software services and maintaining existing ones. Most importantly, it standardizes and simplifies the management of diverse x86-based environments across Microsoft Windows®, Linux, Sun Solaris x86 and Novell NetWare® operating systems.
The IT Challenge Today
Today, IT infrastructure organizations are working diligently to solve the problems created by the explosion in the scope and complexity of IT platforms adopted in the 1990’s. The migration of application architectures to thin-client multi-tier architectures, the introduction of multiple generations of Windows servers and the rapid growth of Linux have swept across IT organizations in successive waves over the last ten years. These waves caused explosive growth in server counts, network complexity and storage volumes throughout geographically distributed IT organizations. The policies and procedures adopted to gain back control of the infrastructure have often introduced their own challenges.
Some of the resulting symptoms reported by IT organizations include:
- Large numbers of under utilized "one-application per box" x86-based servers
- Pervasive over-provisioning caused by policies that size all servers for "worst-case" workload scenarios
- Long delays between change request submissions and operational changes
- Long provisioning cycle times for new servers, storage and networking
- Narrow scheduled downtime windows are over-subscribed with maintenance activities
- Inconsistent, non-reproducible server builds due to a lack of build policies, or an inability to enforce them
- Rushed patch roll-outs that break application functionality or performance because the patch-testing systems do not match production systems
- Multiple infrastructure management systems for distributed Linux, Windows and NetWare servers
- Incomplete information for equipment counts, status and ownership
This list of challenges is daunting, but IT has started to regain the upper hand in the battle against costly, inflexible and disorderly infrastructure. As a first step, IT organizations have generally centralized their IT infrastructure into fewer locations for better visibility. As a second step, they are adopting a new generation of infrastructure technologies and methodologies.
The common vision of IT organizations today is to provide their business units with lower cost, higher service-level infrastructure that enables them to respond faster to business unit demands.
For example, most enterprises have already migrated to storage area networking for a flexible, lower cost, higher service level storage infrastructure. Currently, thousands of enterprises are adopting server virtualization technologies that provide the same benefits for the rest of the IT infrastructure. This synergistic combination of storage, networking and computing virtualization has created a new category of infrastructure software called virtual infrastructure. VMware provides the only production-ready server virtualization suite available today, VMware Infrastructure. Contact PTS today for your virtualization needs.
Whitepaper Download: Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure
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