Virtual Infrastructure with VMWare

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?  What do you use it for?

Our team uses several products to create a "virtual server and data infrastructure".  These solutions are cost-effective and utilize existing server hardware to create a logical server for application hosting.  This way, resources are optimized and costs driven down to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).  We also manage server manageability with virtual services.

Virtual computing environments allow us to:

• Implement server consolidation.  VMware ESX Server consolidates applications and infrastructure services running on diverse operating systems onto fewer highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers.

• Deliver high availability and guarantee service levels. VMware ESX Server allows clustering of virtual machines inside the same system for development and test purposes, or between systems for high availability.  VMware ESX Server guarantees server resources for CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and disk I/O at optimum performance levels, improving service to internal and external customers.

• Streamline testing and deployment.  VMware ESX Server encapsulates virtual machine images so that they can easily be moved from environment to environment, enabling software testers and quality assurance engineers to build more realistic tests in less time with less hardware.

• Scale hardware and software infrastructure.  VMware ESX Server now includes support for VMware Virtual SMP, enabling our enterprise to run some mission-critical applications in flexible, secure, and portable virtual machines.

How does a Virtual Server Infrastructure work?

We primarily use VMware ESX Server to establish our virtual computing infrastructure.  It transforms physical systems into a pool of logical computing resources.  Operating systems and applications are isolated into several virtual machines that reside on a single piece of hardware. System resources are dynamically allocated to any operating system based on need, providing mainframe-class capacity utilization and control of server resources.  The end result is optimization of existing hardware.

VMware simplifies our server infrastructure by partitioning and isolating server resources in secure and portable virtual machines.  It allows these server resources to be remotely managed, automatically provisioned, and standardized on a uniform platform.  Advanced resource management controls allow IT administrators to guarantee service levels across the enterprise.

The software runs directly on the hardware to produce a platform for deploying, managing, and remotely controlling multiple virtual machines at the same time.

• Applications running on dedicated systems can be moved into separate virtual machines on a single, more reliable and scalable system.
• Servers can be remotely managed from any location, simplifying server maintenance.
• Aggressive service support levels can be established with advanced resource management controls.
• Common monitoring and management tasks are including; simplifying administration.
• Application density/capacity can be increased without adding new physical systems or purchasing additional equipment.
• Expensive and conditioned datacenter space is reduced considerably.

For more information, contact our Datacenter Operations group.