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News
This month Dave Turton, XMA's Enterprise Product Manager talks about the latest issues around virtualisation in the business market....
Virtualisation is no longer about single servers, it's an ecosystem
VMware has announced its latest software VMware 4 called
vSphere with 150 new features compared to VI3 and it is the industry's first cloud
operating system.
Typically virtualisation has been about utilising your
hardware more efficiently. For instance a server is typically underutilised by
80 – 90% so by virtualising it and putting a number of virtual servers onto
that physical server, this has enabled ICT infrastructures to shrink in size
and reduce power consumption as well as becoming more efficient.
Where vSphere
is different is that it uses all of the physical servers as one pool of
resources and allows you run virtual servers across them all, much like Cloud
computing does but within your own datacentre.
There are 3 main areas that VMware focuses on: efficiency,
control and choice.
Having watched the live webcast from VMware HQ in Silicon
Valley I am very excited by some of the efficiency changes that are introduced
with vSphere. For example an organisation with 100 virtual servers running VI3
can upgrade to vSphere and save $2M on power costs over the year just through a
software upgrade.
Thin provisioning is also included with vSphere which can
have a dramatic effect on your storage. For example Facebook upgraded from VI3
to vSphere, enabled the storage provisioning and a result could now host 50 times
more images than they could yesterday without any additional hardware costs.
The control element of vSphere can make it easier for
organisations to remain compliant and secure. Also, fault tolerance is a
reality in a virtual environment, for instance if a server has a set DNS
address and this changes, warnings can be sent out and from a management console,
a “Gold” sample of the OS can be rolled out to change the DNS settings back to
what they should be.
VMware has the largest choice of OS, 4 times the number of OS
can be virtualised using VMware, the hardware platform for server and storage
becomes your choice or indeed a heterogeneous environment. PCs and technology come and go within an organisation,
people generally remain in place expecting the same service that they have always
had.
XMA and VMware are able to assist you in making your IT work
the way you want for your organisation as opposed to sometimes being
restricted. Contact your XMA Account Manager to discus virtualisation options in your organisation.
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