ERP packages are successful in part because they force organizations to adopt a technology-driven business process framework. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) plays a very similar role, only in disaster recovery. It forces organizations to adopt technology-driven business continuity processes that in turn enable much more comprehensive and reliable recovery following a disaster.

The challenges of successful and fast recovery when using a traditional physical based DR architecture are increasingly becoming well-known. Disaster recovery is now one of the major drivers for organizations to embrace a virtual infrastructure. And while DR automation with virtualization is vastly superior to the physical alternative, it is not a panacea. Successful business continuity still requires a deep understanding of the business application processes and interdependencies. For example, what interfaces does the system have? Where does it receive information from (upstream) and who does it provide information to (downstream)? Is it part of a multi-tier application or have a web interface for the users, etc? What are the business requirements for recovery order and priority? These are all questions to be considered in order to ensure the successful recovery of an application.

Organizations commonly spend a lot of money on outside consultants to map their business processes and then prepare a thick runbook that serves as their disaster recovery plan. The problem with this approach is that the plan tends to quickly become obsolete as processes or technology changes. Thorough testing is time-consuming and expensive making it both necessary yet difficult for IT staff to obtain management approval for regular DR plan testing. While it’s not widely discussed outside of gloomy statistics published by organizations such as Meta Group and Gartner, organizations tend to realize that their very expensive DR plans are largely works of fiction. They are compiled in order to gain auditor check-off, not to truly enable effective business continuity in the event of a data center catastrophe.

A Virtualization Alternative

Virtualization has long been recognized as providing the foundation for enabling efficient replication and recovery not just of a limited subset of designated mission-critical servers, but of entire datacenters. The challenge has been in how to automate the recovery of virtual machines. Using VMware ESX as the sample virtualization hypervisor, an organization would typically have to go through the following manual steps for virtual machine recovery:

Determine that a disaster has occurred.
Review the Disaster Recovery Plan and follow the recovery steps.
Break the replication between the protected site and the recovery site.
Expose the LUNs at the DR site to the ESX servers.
Rescan the shared storage LUNs on each ESX server that will be part of the recovery.
Indentify where each protected Virtual Machine is located on the storage platform and use the following steps for recovery.
Register the virtual machine
Configure the storage to the point to the virtual disk on the appropriate storage volume
Set the CPU, RAM and networking configuration for the virtual machine
Power up once the upstream dependencies are available and validated
Conduct application and user acceptance tests
Up until recently, no one has been able to easily automate these labor intensive steps. While it is possible to utilize customized scripting, this often leads to testing difficulty and is susceptible to human error. Clustering is sometimes successfully utilized, but it tends to be exorbitantly expensive and tends to be susceptible to outages.

VMware’s industry dominance has afforded it a unique opportunity – the ability to produce a methodology that integrates different replication technologies. The prevalence of VMware in so many production data centers entices the leading storage manufacturers to participate because of the added visibility they achieve.

Site Recovery Manager and ERP Applications

VMware’s DR automation solution, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), automates everything other than the approval process which is still orchestrated by the SRM workflow. Typical business requirements include the identification of applications and data contained within each VM, the criticality and / or prioritization of the hosted applications to be recovered, the expected service levels during a disaster or major outage, a list of the system (VM) dependencies and interfaces, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) needed to validate data integrity after failover, and any other steps needed, if known, to ensure a successful failover. For instance, when recovering a three-tier application the database can be brought up first and then paused until the database is confirmed as being ready for use. The application server is next brought up and paused until it passes an acceptance test. The Web Server is activated and tested as the final step.

Although an ERP application is deployed to streamline business process automation rather than fail over a data center, the functionality is similar. ERP applications also require multi-level approvals – the workflows are validated before they go into production.

Another similarity of ERP applications and SRM involve the definition of business processes. In a production environment, ERP consultants typically require interviewing of business owners in order to address all business process and regulatory compliance requirements. The same holds true for SRM – but based around application recovery. Workflows need to consider business objectives, recovery objectives and the entire dependency of each application – both upstream and downstream.

ERP deployments are nearly guaranteed to fail unless they have the buy-in of management. The same is true for SRM – management must be involved in developing the steps for recovery. In addition to the expenditure approvals, the business application owners need to fully embrace the importance of providing feedback regarding application configurations, interdependencies and priorities.

Dynamic Disaster Recovery Plans

Traditional disaster recovery plans rely upon a series of interviews with personnel designed to determine actual business continuity requirements along with recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives and compliance requirements. SRM goes through an interview process as well, but the similarities end there. Rather than painstakingly compiling a fat runbook that is very difficult to keep accurate and updated, SRM enables the creation of a dynamic DR plan.

SRM also does not require multiple specialized IT resources to be on-hand to recover following a disaster. An administrator is able to activate the plan from within the same management console used for administrating the production environment. The recovery plan steps are then executed exactly as designed. Disaster Recovery is effectively reduced to a touch of a button.

Even testing of the plan is automated and isolated so that it can be done remotely with no danger of disrupting the production environment. It ensures that the recovery process will work even in times of great stress as frequently will accompany a major disaster. The possibility for human error is taken out of the recovery process. The ability to do testing without special approval and without bringing a production environment down will give a higher confidence level to the business owners, customers, and end users

Disruptive Technology

Just as virtualization has been a disruptive technology to the traditional data center, SRM is a disruptive technology to disaster recovery. By forcing organizations to adopt a structured approach to business continuity, it will facilitate far more successful recoveries following a crisis. And because data center virtualization saves so much money on the production side, it also helps to eliminate the perception of disaster recovery as an isolated cost silo. Instead, disaster recovery becomes an effective business strategy that is incorporated as a by-product of virtualization.

Source: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=8312

Microsoft Exchange Virtualized by VMware More than Doubles Native Capacity
of Mailboxes Running on 16-core Physical Servers

CANNES, France, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — VMware, Inc. (NYSE:
VMW) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the
datacenter, has set a record in system capacity and resource utilization
for running Microsoft Exchange. VMware deployed Microsoft Exchange Server
2007 on VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and successfully supported 16,000
heavy-user* Exchange mailboxes on a single 16-way multi-core IBM System
x3850 M2 server. Running Microsoft Exchange on VMware software increased by
more than 100% the number of supportable Exchange users as compared to
Microsoft Exchange’s prescribed recommendations for running natively in a
non-virtualized environment.** VMware virtualization software enables
enterprises to take full advantage of multi-core hardware servers to run
the most demanding enterprise applications much more efficiently.

VMware software allows enterprise applications to overcome scalability
limitations associated with non-virtualized environments. Microsoft
Exchange Server 2007 is one of the most widely-used messaging applications
deployed in production datacenters worldwide. Historically, however, the
design of operating systems and applications has imposed limits on the
number of recommended CPUs and memory per physical server. As a result,
under-utilized physical servers have proliferated in today’s datacenters,
which are costly to manage, maintain, power, and cool.

By running VMware software on powerful multi-core servers, customers
can consolidate larger workloads on fewer physical servers — while at the
same time actually improve capacity. As a result, customers reduce the
capital expenses of hardware maintenance, and the environmental impact of
unnecessary power consumption. Customers can also benefit from VMware
management tools, which enable solutions never possible before
virtualization, including moving workloads from one physical server to
another without interruption, automating resource scheduling, and ensuring
high availability.

VMware benefits are not just being demonstrated in labs, they’re being
realized by organizations in production environments using a variety of
server platforms. For example, Adrian Jane, Infrastructure & Operations
Manager at The University of Plymouth, who is responsible for running
approximately 50,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes across four virtual
machines running VMware Infrastructure 3, said, “Our entire Microsoft
Exchange deployment is virtualized on VMware Infrastructure 3, and we are
extremely pleased with the performance we’ve seen. Furthermore, VMware also
provides us with a high availability solution that has advantages over
traditional clustering options. When it comes to managing production
applications, VMware is a strategy, not just a product.”

At the inaugural VMworld Europe user conference here in Cannes, VMware
President and CEO Diane Greene said to a keynote audience of over 4,500,
“Today’s results published on our website support what our customers have
been telling us from day one — Microsoft applications run best on VMware.
Multi-core hardware advancements complement VMware virtualization software,
and vice versa. Customers are able to ‘refresh’ their datacenters with more
powerful hardware, and they can continue to reduce their space, power and
manageability requirements.”

Testing Methodology

The demonstration included Microsoft Exchange 2007, running on VMware
ESX Server 3.5 on an IBM System x3850 M2 physical server, which features
four of the four-core Intel Xeon 7350 processors on the Caneland platform.
The test followed Microsoft’s guidelines for configuring Exchange (see
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123895(EXCHG.80).aspx ) which
recommends 1000 mailboxes per core and a maximum of 32G of memory per
operating system instance. Using VMware’s software, the test lab created
and ran multiple installations of these “recommended configurations” within
virtual machines. Further details of the testing methodology and results
can be found here: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/.

For customers and partners interested in learning more about deploying
Exchange on VMware please visit:
http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/exchange_solution.html

About VMware

VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions
from the desktop to the datacenter. Customers of all sizes rely on VMware
to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity,
strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion, more
than 100,000 customers and more than 10,000 partners, VMware is one of the
fastest growing public software companies. VMware is headquartered in Palo
Alto, California and on the web at http://www.vmware.com.

* The test utilized a “heavy user” with each mailbox sized to 250MB,
and 500GB of exchange data per virtual machine.

** This data is based on tests conducted by VMware using Microsoft’s
Exchange 2007 Load Generator (LoadGen) tool and recommended methodology.
These tests demonstrate the ability to drive greater CPU and memory
capacity by running Exchange 2007 in virtual machines on VMware
Infrastructure 3 than on the native system, while still respecting
Microsoft’s recommended configuration maximums and 1,000 mailboxes per core
guidance.

VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States
and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may
be trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact:
Greg Eden
VMware Public Relations
eden@vmware.com
650-427-1095

Andrew Schmitt
OutCast Communications for VMware
andrew@outcastpr.com
415-392-8282 ext 706

By Dave Trowbridge

Given today’s weakened economy, CIOs are naturally reconsidering their IT budgets, wondering if the spending priorities they set earlier in the year are still appropriate. But if the CIOs interviewed for the Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey of July 2008 are representative, those priorities make even more sense now than they did before the recent downturn.

They identified their top three spending initiatives over the next 12 months (in order of priority) as server virtualization, server consolidation and cost cutting.

Considering the well-known advantages of data center virtualization, which arise in large part from its ability to support server consolidation and reduce operating expenses, there’s certainly no reason to reprioritize that spending mix.

But CIOs who focus solely on those aspects of virtualization could still find they have the wrong investment mix after the economy emerges from its slump. That’s because consolidation and cost-cutting are just the first step in the virtualization journey that leads eventually to cloud computing: a completely abstracted, highly flexible and agile IT infrastructure that can deliver any content to any device (servers, storage, applications) anytime, anywhere.

Virtualization: Smart IT Investment in a Tough Economy

Streamlining IT Operations

That’s still a ways off, but it is coming – and appropriate investments now can not only save money in the present, but also set up an organization to reap big benefits down the road with an infrastructure that’s ready for the future.

“The biggest mistake CIOs are likely to make about virtualization is to think of it only in terms of getting more out of the physical infrastructure,” says James Urquhart, Market Manager for Cloud Computing and Virtualization in the Data Center Solutions Group at Cisco.

The consolidation that virtualization makes possible, putting 25 to 40 servers or more on a single physical box, can help businesses make better use of physical resources.

Although that’s definitely an advantage – without server virtualization, businesses must overprovision compute resources to handle peaks, operating below capacity the rest of the time – it’s only a starting point.
Virtualization can dramatically simplify and streamline IT operations. “You can create a standard server in software which has been tested against the applications you typically use, so rolling out a new server is just a software installation,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, an analyst at Nemertes Research. “This produces a staggering reduction in operating expenses by increasing the number of servers each administrator can handle. You free up headcount, make fewer mistakes, deal with fewer exceptions, and generally increase reliability and stability.”

Network Designed for Virtualization

But Urquhart points out that realizing this gain in efficiency requires a network infrastructure optimized for virtualization.

The Cisco Nexus family of data center-class switching products aims to provide this capability “We’re getting strong feedback from our customers that the Nexus switches are not only a step towards virtualization, but a big part of their strategy to reduce device count in the data center, and along with it, both capital and operating expenses.”

And, in fact, says William Charnock, Vice President of Technology at the global hosting provider ThePlanet.com, that’s where his company has started. “While our internal IT department is aggressively evaluating virtualization, it’s not yet a big part of our business model.

“For us, the high port density of the Nexus switches gives us a highly efficient use of our bandwidth resources, flattens and simplifies our network, and cuts down our device count, all of which reduces our capital investment and cuts our operating costs.”

More Services for Customers

But Charnock agrees that this is just the start of benefits ThePlanet.com expects to see from the Nexus line.

“Once we have that kind of network density and flexibility, virtualization will be much easier to accomplish when customers demand it. We’ll make virtualization tools available to our traditional customers as an add-on, giving us a lower price point for our services, while we build a virtualization platform to support more complex needs.”

Bill Williams, Senior IP Architect at Terremark, a leading global provider of managed IT infrastructure services, sees similar benefits from the Nexus line. “The Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 serve as the foundation architecture of Terremark’s Data Center managed services portfolio, and will help us reduce costs while providing customers greater bandwidth and services.”

Infrastructure Urquhart notes that a lot of the impetus for hosted virtualization – virtualized data center infrastructure offered by a third-party service provider – is coming from smaller companies rather than large enterprises.

Infrastructure on Demand

“There’s what I call a ‘barrier to exit’ in the enterprise, which tends to have a huge investment in traditional data center models – not only in terms of capital, but in operational processes and even the business model. Smaller firms don’t have that, and tend to be more open to hosted virtualization.”[

Charnock agrees. The bulk of his company’s customers are small businesses – more than 20,000 small companies, many with no more five employees.

“They come to us for infrastructure on demand, and we end up being almost a lending arm for them, offering a month-to-month model that lets them get in easily without a huge investment,” he says. “Virtualization is just more of the same, in some sense.”

But, he notes, there’s still a barrier, in terms of trust. “Customers like the idea of the ‘locked cage,’ and they’re still wary of sharing resources, despite the price advantage it might offer.” As well, in some cases, regulatory compliance forbids the kind of resource sharing that comes with virtualization.

Low Cost, High Quality

Charnock expects those barriers to fall, and says that for ThePlanet.com, virtualization is a necessary technology, one that the company will adopt due to both customer demand and business issues.

“It’s a perfect fit with our fundamental business model: very low-cost, high-quality services for customers that can’t afford the kind of infrastructure we offer,” he says.

And he points out that such services are precisely what victims of the down economy who’ve lost their jobs may need if they jump into entrepreneurial mode. “Month-to-month infrastructure rental lets entrepreneurs get started proving their big idea, and it’s our foot in the door when they succeed. Virtualization will make it easier for us to work with ‘the next YouTube’ and grow with them – that’s the real bottom line.”

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/ts_012709.html?sid=BAC-NewsWire

January 6, 2009 | SearchStorageChannel.com

Storage sales were relatively high while overall IT spending was far lower than usual last quarter, according to VARs surveyed by financial adviser firm Robert W. Baird & Co.

Fourth-quarter IT sales were “well-below normal” seasonality, according to a report by Baird analyst Jayson Noland. The results came from 40 VARs representing about $6 billion in annual IT spending mostly in North America and Western Europe. The VARs were asked to characterize their quarter as above plan, below plan or at plan for the quarter.

Thirty VARs characterized storage as above plan and five said it was below plan – by far the most positive results of any product category. Noland wrote that Network Appliance, Brocade, Data Domain and CommVault received positive scores “relative to overall trends” for the fourth quarter, which is historically the biggest for IT spending.

Noland added that customers are looking for technology that can save them money rather than high-end storage systems. “We expect IT managers to reduce storage spending by finding better bargains and cost savings technology,” he wrote. “Four of the five negative responses for storage specified ‘high-end’ or ‘large’ storage, implying a shift to lower-cost storage which we view as somewhat of a headwind to EMC.”

VARs ranked VMware, Data Domain, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard as vendors that save customers the most money.

“We expect Network Appliance to benefit from a shift to lower-cost storage spending due to budget constraints,” Noland wrote. “VMware’s technology continues to be disruptive to the industry and save customers from buying additional server hardware and components, and Data Domain’s deduplication engine is taking significant cost out of the backup market.”

Other signs ominous for storage

Despite the Baird survey results, there are indications that storage sales were disappointing last quarter. HBA vendor Emulex Corp. and systems vendor LSI have lowered their revenue estimates for the quarter in recent weeks. Emulex now expects to report revenue in the range of $107 million to 108 million, down from its October forecast of $111 million to 116 million. LSI reduced its outlook to $570 million to $610 million, from its October outlook of $670 million to $710 million.

BAAQMD engaged INX to virtualize their production data center with VMware ESX Servers to eliminate unplanned server outages, dramatically reduce the time involved in tasks such as server provisioning and to reduce the agency’s carbon footprint and IT expenses. Sixty physical servers were virtualized onto seven VMware ESX host servers, eliminating nearly 300 tons of annual CO2 emissions and saving over $50,000 in annual energy costs alone.

“We were very pleased with the high availability, power reductions and cost savings that resulted from INX’s VMware deployment,” said John Chiladakis, Director of Information Services for BAAQMD. “Now we are taking the next step and utilizing virtualization to ensure rapid recovery in the event of a catastrophe to our San Francisco offices, such as an earthquake or fire. We are replicating all of our business critical servers themselves to INX’s DR facility.”

INX’s hosted disaster recovery offering, “Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service®”, is hosted out of top tier Data Centers in the Sacramento area. INX utilizes VMware along with proprietary methodologies to enable both efficient replication and recovery of virtual machines.

Steve Kaplan, Vice President of INX’s data center virtualization practice, said, “BAAQMD is a forward thinking organization that very quickly realized the benefits that virtualization brings both to their production and disaster recovery environments.”

Mark Hilz, President of INX commented, “Most DR environments sit idle other than when being tested. We’ve built a world-class virtual infrastructure enabling us to leverage facility, equipment, software and expert staffing resources over a large number of geographically disparate clients. This enables us to provide a superior DR solution at a lower cost than organizations could possibly achieve internally. Our contracts include mandatory semi-annual testing. We want our clients to know that our DR service actually works – it’s not just there to achieve an auditor check off.”

About INX Inc.:

INX Inc. (NASDAQ: INXI – News) is a leading U.S. provider of unified communications and data center virtualization solutions for enterprise organizations. We offer a suite of advanced technology solutions focused around the entire life-cycle of enterprise IP network communications and data center infrastructure. Our services are centered on the design, implementation and support of network infrastructure, including routing and switching, wireless, security, unified communications, and data center solutions such as network, storage and server virtualization. Our customers include enterprise organizations such as corporations, as well as federal, state and local governmental agencies. Because of our focus, expertise and experience implementing and supporting advanced technology solutions for enterprises, we believe we are well positioned to deliver superior solutions and services to our customers. Additional information about INX can be found on the Web at www.inxi.com.

Safe Harbor Statement:

The statements contained in this document that are not statements of historical fact, including, but not limited to, statements identified by the use of terms such as “anticipate,” “appear,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “hope,” “indicate,” “intend,” “likely,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “potential,” “project,” “seek,” “should,” “will,” “would,” and other variations or negative expressions of these terms, including statements related to the benefit that INX expects from the announced contract, as well as statements related to expected market trends and INX performance. All such statements are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The actual results of the future events described in the forward-looking statements in this document could differ materially from those stated in the forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Recipients of this document are cautioned to consider these risks and uncertainties and to not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statement contained herein to reflect any change in the company’s expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances upon which any statement is based.

Contact:
INX Inc.
Brian Fontana, 713-795-2000
Chief Financial Officer
Brian.Fontana@inxi.com

 Source: http://inxi.com/investPressDet.asp?id=126

Here is a good Site Recovery Manager demo on YOUTUBE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hap4VsC9a1k

Source: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20080804b.html

Our weakening economy means the enormous savings resulting from a virtualized data center make its implementation still more compelling.  And yet, fearing their IT staffs lack the skill sets required to effectively administer the new environment, management is often slow to roll out virtual infrastructure as their organization’s production data center platform.  The reality is that a VMware virtualized data center is very intuitive, and it is simpler, less demanding and far more resilient than a physical architecture.  Rather than being encumbered with the burden of learning a new technology, IT staff are empowered by being able to accomplish more in significantly less time.  Virtualization takes the best tools from an administrator’s tool belt and makes them better.

Remote Access

Virtualized data centers give administrators a degree of flexibility and control not possible in the physical world.  This can be seen, perhaps, most prominently by the challenge of implementing effective remote access.  Physical environments rely upon either a hardware or software based form of remote access.  A hardware solution frequently utilizes a fairly expensive IP based KVM, a tool that does not always provide a good user experience.  Alternatively, a software solution such as Microsoft RDP is not able to provide administrators with access outside the operating system which must be running in order to obtain access.  And neither of these solutions provides an administrator with access to the power functions required to turn on a machine that was mistakenly shutdown.
 
Virtualized data centers enable an administrator to open a console connection to a virtual machine.  This console connection provides the same “out of operating system” access as an IP based KVM (an administrator may watch the VM power up from BIOS to OS), but provides performance that is comparable to using a local system.  Moreover, the administrator has full access to all power functions remotely.  This accessibility enables an administrator to fully control her environment, be it from her desk in the office or from home. 

Adding Server Hardware
 
Adding additional hardware to a physical data center server can be an awkward process.  If a server needs more memory, for example, an administrator must first open the server to determine how many (if any) RAM slots are available.  The administrator then needs to determine the most cost effective way to achieve the desired amount of memory given the particular motherboard restrictions.  An approval process and purchase order drafting follows along with a subsequent wait in shipping time for RAM or, in some cases, for a technician to come and install the memory.  After the hardware is acquired, the installation often must take place after hours in order to minimize user downtime.  Administrators have learned to compensate for this process by over allocating server resources in order to minimize the need for hardware changes. 
 
Adjusting a virtual machine’s memory, on the other hand, is as simple as shutting the machine down, then adjusting a slider bar.  Additional hard disks or NICs are a short wizard away.  Additional CPUs can be added via a pull down menu.  These hardware changes can be accomplished in mere minutes whereas their physical counterparts might take weeks.  Access to the servers’ hardware allows administrators to get away from the wasteful “over allocate” paradigm and allows them to size their virtual servers accurately.
 
Troubleshooting

The stress becomes palpable when an unanticipated IT problem forces administrators to scramble in an attempt to quickly determine and fix the cause.  The administrators are handicapped, though, in their ability to attempt different fixes by their mandate to never do anything that could make the situation worse.  Registry edits, for example, are common examples of changes that carry this burden; a registry edit can often fix a problem on a Windows server but, if deployed incorrectly, can kill the entire system.  This risk ties the administrators’ hands – forcing them to find an alternate, less risky, solution.
 
A common trick is to make a backup copy of a configuration file prior to making changes in order to allow an easy fallback point if things go wrong.  Since virtual machines are just a collection of files, administrators can take this technique and kick it up a notch – the entire server can be copied prior to making changes.  With VMware snapshots, every aspect of the current state of the machine is saved including the memory state, the hard drive state and the virtual hardware state.  Creating a snapshot frees an administrator to attempt any fix desired.  In a worst case scenario, the administrator simply rolls the virtual machine back to the point where the snapshot was taken and every aspect of the machine is reverted.  Windows, or whatever operating system runs the virtual machine, has no idea that those changes were ever made, and the administrator is free to try something else.
 
Administrators can freely size and resize their virtual servers, giving each server the hardware that it needs without wasting resources on a server that won’t utilize those resources.  Administrators can make changes to their virtual servers with the confidence of an absolute fallback point.  VMware’s VMotion allows the IT staff to upgrade or trouble-shoot servers in the middle of the day with no disruption to user sessions.  They can simply VMotion the virtual machines to another ESX host, troubleshoot or upgrade the original host, then VMotion back.

Server Testing

A task such as migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 is typically difficult and expensive to test effectively and inevitably incurs risk.  In a virtualized data center, an administrator can snap a copy of the production Exchange server, and then do the migration in a test sandbox that duplicates the production environment.  Even the network can be replicated by utilizing different NICs for VLANs.  VMware’s rollback capabilities enable reversion to earlier stages of the migration if problems are encountered.  Once the migration has been successfully completed, the administrator can point to the snapped server as the new production box.  This process eliminates much of the cost, time and effort…and all of the risk of the migration.  In fact, this virtual QA process is so easy yet beneficial, that administrators use it for essentially everything of any importance.  Test cycles are shortened while hardware conflicts, configuration and set-up periods are all eliminated.

Server Patching

Patching servers in a physical data center is dangerous because administrators can never be certain that individual server hardware or driver disparities won’t cause a new patch to break the server or application.  Virtualized data centers enable the application of a server patch during the middle of the day with 100% confidence of no downtime because if it worked on the test server, it will work on all of the servers.  The servers are, after all, identical – provisioned from software templates maintained on a SAN library.   VMware’s Update Manager further automates the process of patches and updates, including patch tracking and management.   It includes options to snapshot virtual machines prior to patch application, enabling administrators to rollback the virtual machine to a known state if the patch has unforeseen side effects.  Update Manager can even patch offline virtual machines without exposing them to the network.

Capacity Planning and Server Budgeting

A virtualized data center is not only much less expensive than the physical equivalent, it is easier to plan from a capacity standpoint, and to budget.  The IT staff can use VMware VCenter to view server resources as an aggregate pool of CPU, memory and I/O.  Utilization trends may show, for example, that aggregate server utilization will rise to 70% in 6 months – and therefore indicate a budget requirement for a new server at that time.

Performance Monitoring

A virtualized data center affords better purview into the “Core Four” Resources: CPU, Memory, Network I/O, Disk I/O.  This in turn enables administrators to more easily tune their environments to enhance performance while minimizing hardware resources.

Other Virtualized Data Center Administration Benefits

Data center virtualization extends beyond just servers – it includes storage, network, security, disaster recovery, desktops and applications.  A virtual infrastructure provides a unifying platform with interdependencies among each function that enables a much more efficient and elegant architecture.  VMware continues to add new capabilities to this environment that go far beyond anything possible in a physical realm.  Its growing suite of automation products, for example, provide enhancements such as workflow approval for server provisioning, slashing time to market for software development and automating data center failover and migration.  VMware’s new View 3 VDI solution enables a whole new dimension of simplifying IT administration by virtualizing both the desktops and the applications, then moving them to the data center. 

Virtualized data centers are benefiting network administration as well.  The Nexus 1000V virtual switch appliance will debut in the spring of 2009.  It enhances the operations of both the physical and networking infrastructures. The Nexus 1000V enables greater efficiencies between the server and network teams by assigning Cisco service, security and operational policies across each VMware virtual machine.  It provides network administrators with all the features that a physical Ethernet switch enables including QOS, Tagged VLANS, rate limiting and debugging commands.

IT Staff Converts

Despite management concerns, a properly envisioned, designed and deployed virtualized data center reduces demands on the IT staff.  Moreover, they inevitably become fans.  This is evidenced by the 12,000 enthusiastic attendees at VMworld this year, even though it was only the 5th such event.  Virtualization lets administrators move away from the drudgery of routine server issues and midnight maintenance windows.  They can instead spend more time on learning and implementing interesting technology that adds true value to their organizations. 
Written by Steve Kaplan & Jason Coleman

Source: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9425