VMware Server Consolidation

Overview:

By consolidating your server hardware with VMware vSphere, the most robust software suite in the industry for server consolidation, your organization can:

• Increase utilization of existing hardware from 5-15% up to 80%
• Reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better

Our Professional Services team can help you assess your IT environment to identify consolidation candidates and to calculate the potential savings from using virtualization.

Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure from a Single Point of Control

While most vendors offer only single-point solutions for server virtualization, VMware gives you the power to manage an entire virtual infrastructure from a single point of control. Using the production-proven VMware vSphere, your organization can:

• Accelerate provisioning time by 50-70%
• Manage virtual machines from a central location
• Monitor the performance of virtual machines and their hosts

These and other benefits have enabled more than 85% of our customers to use VMware virtual machines in production environments for a wide range of applications.

Automate your Virtual Infrastructure for Peak Performance

Deliver levels of performance, scalability and availability that are not possible with a physical infrastructure. Using VMware vCenter Server in combination with our VMware VMotion and VMware DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) products, your organization will be able to:

• Avoid planned downtime with live migration of virtual machines
• Enable dynamic policy-based allocation of IT resources with automated load balancing
• Eliminate many repetitive configuration and maintenance tasks

VMware Professional Services and our partners can help your organization leverage these unique capabilities as part of an ongoing strategy.

Consolidate:

Get more out your existing resources by consolidating x86 servers with VMware vSphere. The traditional “one workload, one box” approach to server provisioning inevitably leads to over-provisioning and underutilization of hardware assets. Most servers operate at only about 5-15% of their total load capacity.

The costs of delivering power, cooling, network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, administrative overhead and real estate to underutilized servers continues to increase. You can eliminate server sprawl by converting your x86 physical machines into fully functional virtual machines. VMware virtual machines run independently from the underlying hardware and are supported on a broad array of physical servers, from 2-CPU to 32-CPU systems.

Each VMware virtual machine represents a complete system—with processors, memory, networking, storage and BIOS—enabling you to run Windows, Linux, Solaris and NetWare operating systems and software applications on the same piece of hardware at the same time. Running multiple workloads on highly configured x86 servers lets you increase the utilization of your server hardware from 10-15% to as much as 80%. Download the free VMware vCenter Converter utility to convert physical machines into virtual machines in minutes, without service disruption or system downtime. VMware vCenter Converter can be run on a wide variety of hardware and supports most commonly used versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Reduce Hardware Requirements by a 10:1 Ratio or Better

Using VMware vSphere, your organization can significantly reduce the amount of IT hardware in the data center. Each instance of VMware ESX can support more than 100 virtual machines. In fact, the vast majority of our customers run as many as 10 or more applications on a single piece of hardware.

Cut Hardware & Operating Costs in Half

Fewer servers means less money spent on energy consumption due to reduced power and cooling requirements. Cost savings can be significant—approximately $500-600 per server, per year.

When totaled with the hardware cost savings and other capital reductions, VMware solutions can help your organization save more than $3,000 annually for every server you virtualize.

VMware virtual machines cumulatively have saved over five billion Kilowatt-hours of electrical power. The impact of virtualization on energy consumption is so significant that utility providers in California such as PG&E, SoCal Edison and SDG&E are paying customers for server virtualization projects that result in the removal of server computing equipment. Learn more about VMware's virtualization energy efficiency incentives.

Manage:

While virtualization reduces the amount of hardware in the data center, you’ll still need tools and solutions for managing workloads as virtual machines. VMware gives you the tools and power to manage your entire virtual infrastructure. Working closely with industry standards organizations and our technology partners, we can ensure seamless interoperation through open interfaces and standards-based technologies.

• Manage and monitor virtual machines from a central location
• Reduce the time it takes to provision new servers by 50-70%
• Allocate shared IT resources with greater flexibility

Manage Heterogeneous Systems from a Single Point of Control

Maintain high levels of service across your virtual infrastructure with VMware vSphere. Unify the management of your heterogeneous x86-based operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Netware systems, by placing them on a single virtual hardware platform. Monitor and analyze virtual machines, resource pools, server utilization and availability with detailed performance graphs. Define the performance metrics important to you with the levels of granularity you need and view them in real time, or across a specified time interval.

Accelerate Provisioning Time by 50% - 70%

Eliminate repetitive installation and configuration tasks with virtual machine templates. These reusable images make it fast and simple to provision new server workloads. When coupled with the hardware independence afforded by virtualization, you can reduce the time it takes to deploy new IT services by as much as 50% - 70%.

You’ll also more easily enforce corporate standards such as anti-virus and management software in any machine connected to the network. VMware vSphere can keep templates current with OS and application updates, so the templates you create have more lasting value.

Automate:

Dynamically allocate and balance computing capacity and virtual machine placement across the data center so that you can deliver on-demand IT resources wherever and whenever they are needed with VMware ESX , VMware vCenter Server, VMware VMotion and VMware DRS. Eliminate planned downtime with live migration of virtual machines and enable automatic capacity-on-demand to maximize performance.

Maximize the Efficiency & Responsiveness of your Datacenter

Transform your IT infrastructure into a responsive, scalable, self-optimizing datacenter with VMware vSphere’s built-in capabilities for resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities. You’ll see dramatic cost savings as well as increased operational efficiency, flexibility and IT service levels. VMware vSphere scales to support IT environments of any size and is not tied to any operating system, giving you a bias-free choice of operating system and software applications.

Enable Live Migration of Virtual Machines from Server to Server

Migrate virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity with VMotion, part of VMware vSphere. Live migration of virtual machines lets you perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime and disrupting business operations.

Deliver Mission-Critical Services on Demand, Automatically

Balance computing capacity more efficiently across the resource pools in your virtual infrastructure with VMware DRS and VMware VMotion. VMware DRS continuously monitors CPU and RAM utilization, allocating available resources automatically based on pre-defined policies that reflect business needs and priorities.

The end result with VMware DRS is a data center that can reliably run at over 80% utilization levels while safely maintaining guaranteed service levels for all applications. VMware DRS delivers much better ROI on x86 server investments with minimal amount of capacity planning.