VMware Virtualizes Enterprise Applications

Overview:

Application architectures are rapidly evolving towards highly distributed, loosely coupled applications. Multitier applications, now the norm, will become more even important with the move to SOA, Web 2.0 applications and other emerging application frameworks.

The conventional x86 computing model, with applications tightly coupled to physical servers, is too static and fragmented to efficiently support these complex and dynamic applications. In fact, in these environments more than 70% of IT budgets are used just to manage existing applications and IT services. Less than 30% is allocated to innovation and competitive advantage.

Deliver Applications Dynamically in a Cost-Efficient Private Cloud

As the first cloud operating system, VMware vSphere transforms IT infrastructures into a private cloud delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Free existing and future application loads from the constraints of a static, dedicated infrastructure, by utilizing a collection of internal clouds that federate on-demand to external clouds.

Exceed the Performance of Applications on Physical Servers

More than 95% of applications, including large databases, enterprise business suites, and email, will match and even exceed the performance achieved on physical servers when run on VMware vSphere. Each virtual machine can scale to 8 vCPU, 256 GB of memory and support IO intensive applications. Your applications achieve far greater scalability per physical host by scaling out on multiple virtual machines—often the only way to leverage the capacity of the latest multicore servers.

Minimize Infrastructure Costs

Achieve 5X to 10X consolidation ratios for demanding applications such as Exchange and SAP. Eliminate the need to provision dedicated testing, staging, training, and DR servers. In production, give applications exactly the capacity they need, when they need it and eliminate the need to overprovision.

Accelerate Application Delivery

Create pre-configured vApps that can be provisioned on demand, test multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently and automate release cycles with VMware vCenter Stage Manager. Deploy standard, pre-configured application stacks at the click of a button, ensuring consistency across production applications and minimizing manual configuration overhead and configuration errors.

Guarantee Application Quality of Service

Ensure end-user QoS by automatically providing the right levels of application availability and scalability with the vSphere Application Services. Dynamically dial up or down application availability and scalability levels as business requirements evolve so you can meet QoS requirements in the most cost-effective way.

Leverage the Broad ISV Ecosystem

Get broad ISV support. Three of the top four global ISVs—Microsoft, SAP, and IBM—now provide the same level of application support on VMware as on physical servers. Hundreds of smaller ISVs support their applications on VMware, recognizing the value that virtualization brings to their customers.

Performance:

VMware continually improves the performance of ESX with each new version.  Today’s virtual machines can support the most demanding applications, thanks to performance capabilities such as:

• 8 Virtual CPUs and 256 GB of memory per VM
• Performance overhead limited to less than 10% to 20%
• ESX support for > 200,000 IOPS
• 40 Gbps ESX network bandwidth

At these levels of performance, more than 95% of the 700,000 applications we have measured in our customer base deliver comparable levels of performance running in a virtual machine as on physical servers, including the majority of large 8-CPU databases.

Scale Multiple Virtual Machines on Large Multicore Servers

Hardware is continuing to evolve down the path of packing an ever-increasing number of processor cores per chip. Unfortunately, very few applications are sufficiently multi-threaded to truly scale to the full capacity of these servers. Break through application scalability limitations by scaling out on multiple virtual machines and enabling multiple instances to share a single server. Leverage the full CPU capacity of large multicore servers while better utilizing memory and preserving isolation between instances.

See 100% Increase in Exchange Throughput

For example, the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server running on physical servers can only scale to about 8 processor cores and support about 8,000 heavy mailbox users, whether running on an 8-core or 16-core server. Exchange Mailbox Servers running on VMware can be scaled out to achieve record server throughput of 16,000 heavy mailbox users by leveraging the full capacity of a 16-core server. This throughput is achieved by scaling Exchange out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 heavy mailbox users.

VMware Sets Performance Record for Web Servers with SPECweb2005 Result

VMware published the largest SPECweb2005 score to date on a 16 core server. This record score of 44,000 includes an ecommerce component demonstrating 69,525 concurrent connections. While record-setting performance of web servers proves the capabilities of ESX, the real story of web server virtualization is the gains from web farm consolidation and improved flexibility. Web front end infrastructure today is designed around hundreds or even thousands of often underutilized two and four core servers. Consolidation of these servers onto modern systems with multi-core CPUs reduces costs, simplifies management and eases power and cooling demands.

Application Delivery:

Introduce new application functionality in response to changing business needs faster than ever before with virtualization. The growing and unmanageable volume of application changes that must be tested, staged and deployed into production can be addressed with VMware vSphere, accelerating service delivery from testing to provisioning.

Provision Applications on Demand

Eliminate the months of lead time required to procure and install dedicated hardware, provision and configure the OS, and finally configure the multiple application tiers. These long delays cripple business agility and dramatically slow down the availability of new functionality and services. This manual process is also error-prone and can lead to configuration mistakes and application downtime.

VMware vSphere enables the creation of a library of vApps, easily provisioned on demand to your existing virtual infrastructure. These gold images of pre-configured multi-tier applications ensure configuration consistency across application instances and eliminate the overhead and risk associated with manual configurations. Operational policies and service level requirements are also contained in vApps, which VMware vSphere automatically identifies and executes by providing the required levels of availability and scalability.

Streamline Testing & Troubleshooting

Test and troubleshoot your complex, multitier applications quickly while minimizing risk of change. Use VMware vCenter Server Snapshots and Clones to reproduce your vApps, encapsulating entire multitier applications, in the lab in minutes. Test application changes in the context of related application tiers on an exact copy of your production configuration to minimize the risk of errors. Eliminate the need to provision applications manually for each test cycle.

Automate Release Cycles

Automate your release cycles with VMware vCenter Lab Manager. Visualize, streamline and automate the process of rolling new and updated applications into production. Applications can be promoted between the stages of the release process and into production with no manual provisioning. Reduce the risks associated with application changes by enabling IT and application administrators to easily clone system configurations and maintain consistent virtual machine images throughout the release process.

Application QoS:

Ensuring end-user QoS for multi-tier applications is increasingly difficult due to sizing capacity to support unpredictable loads, identifying performance bottlenecks and relying on a patchwork of availability solutions. VMware vSphere enables administrators to ensure end-user QoS by automatically providing the right levels of application availability and scalability using built-in Application Services. Application availability and scalability levels can be dialed up or down dynamically as business requirements evolve so you can meet QoS requirements in the most cost-effective way.

Scale Applications Dynamically to Ensure Service Levels

Monitor performance and pinpoint bottlenecks: Get deep visibility into the performance of applications running on VMware vSphere with VMware vCenter AppSpeed. Automatically discover applications and map the flow of transactions through multiple application tiers and infrastructure components. Monitor end-user QoS and pinpoint bottlenecks to individual applications and virtual machines. Optimize infrastructure sizing decisions to ensure end-user QoS while minimizing infrastructure costs.

Scale applications dynamically: Scale your applications dynamically to ensure QoS under variable load. Re-size virtual machines on the fly with hot-add of virtual CPU and memory, scale capacity up or down using VMware VMotion and VMware DRS, or scale out applications by provisioning new instances in minutes. Eliminate the need to overprovision capacity to support variable loads.

Protect All Applications with Simple and Cost-Effective Availability

Eliminate planned downtime: Planned downtime is typically the number one cause of downtime and creates significant organizational overhead with the negotiation of inconvenient maintenance windows days ahead of time. Eliminate planned downtime for hardware maintenance with VMware VMotion. When a physical host requires hardware maintenance, use VMotion to move applications off that host for the duration of the maintenance, with no impact to application availability.

Protect all applications with simple high availability: Simplify application availability by eliminating the need to use complex application-specific clustering solutions. Protect all of your applications from hardware failures with VMware HA and VMware Fault Tolerance, which are automatically available to all applications running on VMware vSphere. VMware HA provides automated restart of virtual machines in the event of hardware or OS failure, while VMware Fault Tolerance ensures continuous availability by keeping a secondary virtual machine in exact lockstep with the primary.

Provide cost-effective disaster recovery for all applications. Protect all of your applications from disasters with VMware Disaster Recovery solutions. Use VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to ensure fast, successful recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing customized recovery plans for each application.