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NetEx is a Gold Partner/Reseller of VMware Solutions, specializing in providing Virtual solutions to institutions that are seeking consolidated server solutions. This is an ideal solution for institutions that are looking for very cost-effective, centralized system resources. By deploying this solution, there is no need to buy expensive heterogeneous hardware platforms.
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Assessing the Impact of an Outage Business operations that are heavily dependent upon information systems may be significantly impacted even by a brief application outage. Impact of a data loss is even more drastic. IDC estimates that in a disaster situation, the average loss is $3 million per incident and $381,000 per hour. To develop an effective business continuity strategy, businesses must assess how critical each of the IT applications is to the business viability. This assessment may include: • Hourly cost of outage (especially critical in revenue generating systems such as E-commerce and CRM) • Reliability of recovery (especially critical in financial systems) • Existence of alternative or manual processes that can be temporarily used in case of a disaster
The Need for Business Continuity Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning are critical to managing risks in a successful business. Between 60-90% of companies that don’t have a pro-active disaster plan find themselves out of business within 24 months of experiencing a major disaster. However, implementation of a reliable recovery strategy with fast time to recovery is expensive largely because it involves maintaining duplicate equipment that mirrors the equipment in the primary data center and upgrading both primary and recovery-target equipment in lock-step, hence many companies forgo the process.
Virtual Infrastructure in the Enterprise Virtual infrastructure provides a layer of abstraction between the computing, storage, networking hardware, and the software that runs on it. Virtual infrastructure simplifies IT computing architecture so companies can leverage their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them. The Administrator manages and optimizes resources globally across the enterprise. VMware’s virtual infrastructure architecture enables businesses to lower IT costs through increased efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness. Managing a virtual infrastructure enables IT to connect resources to business needs quickly. IT organizations can provision new services and change the amount of resources dedicated to a software service. The data center can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking power. Adopting virtual infrastructure lets IT be responsive to business needs, including:
• 60-80% utilization rates for Intel servers – up from today’s 5-15% • Provisioning times for new applications measured in tens of seconds, not days • Response times for change requests measured in minutes • Zero down-time hardware maintenance without waiting for maintenance windows
The VMware virtual hardware platform implemented by VMware virtual machines makes virtual infrastructure possible. It creates a uniform hardware image – implemented in software – on which operating systems and applications run. On top of this platform, the VMware family of products provides management and provisioning of virtual machines; continuous workload consolidation across physical servers. With virtual infrastructure, IT organizations can provision new services and change the amount of resources dedicated to a software service. Hardware management is completely separated from software management and hardware equipment can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking power to be allocated and de-allocated on the fly to various software services. Integration With Backup Software: With Virtual Infrastructure, IT managers have an option to continue using the existing backup processes even with virtualized hardware. VMware software supports a wide variety of backup agents operating inside VMs, which allows the backup server to control the backup and file restoration process in a consistent manner for physical and virtual servers. With VMware virtual infrastructure built on an ESX Server you can: • Streamline data center operations and reduce hardware requirements with server consolidation ratios commonly exceeding eight virtual machines per physical processor. • Guarantee service levels to applications and dynamically change system resource allocations. • Instantly provision new virtual servers using hardware independent templates as business needs demand. • Use the optional VMotion feature for migrating live virtual machines between physical servers for dynamic load balancing and zero down-time maintenance on live systems. • Manage ESX Servers and their virtual machines remotely from any location using the management applications you already own or tools from VMware.
Implement server consolidation of a branch office and a data center, mission-critical applications, and infrastructure services onto fewer highly scalable, highly reliable enterprise-class servers. Virtualizing blade servers is an especially effective approach.
Use VirtualCenter to deploy and manage ESX Server Virtual Infrastructure Nodes and manage your hardware resources as a single pool of computer, storage, and networking power. Dynamically load balance workloads across the pool and avoid planned down-times. Protect critical data in secure virtual machines that can be clustered with physical and virtual systems. Precisely control system resources granted to virtual machines and run them across multiple processors with Virtual SMP (optional).
ü Create low-cost virtual machine clusters providing hardware and software fault tolerance ü Run resource-intensive server workloads like Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange and SAP on multi-processor virtual machines ü Reliably meet IT performance metrics ü Run IT as an enterprise service provider, delivering better service levels to customers
Dramatically lower the cost of disaster recovery capability by creating a unified disaster recovery platform using ESX Server virtual machines as standby servers. A single x86 system can host multiple disaster recovery virtual machines maintained in a hot or cold state.
ü Streamline disaster recovery management, increase availability, reduce recovery time and lower hardware and operational costs ü Eliminate the need for costly one-to-one mapping of production and disaster recovery servers
What Is The VMware ESX Server?
VMware® ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments. The ESX Server speeds up service deployments and adds management flexibility by partitioning x86 servers into a pool of secure, portable, and hardware-independent virtual machines.
VMware® ESX Server™ transforms physical systems into a pool of logical computing resources. Operating systems and applications are isolated in multiple 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. VMware ESX Server simplifies server infrastructure by partitioning and isolating server resources in secure and portable virtual machines. VMware ESX Server enables 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. VMware ESX Server runs directly on the system hardware to provide a secure, uniform platform for deploying, managing, and remotely controlling multiple virtual machines.
• 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. • Service levels can be guaranteed with advanced resource management.
How Is VMware ESX Server Used In The Enterprise?
Ideally suited for enterprise data centers, the ESX Server minimizes the total cost of ownership (TCO) of computing infrastructure by increasing resource utilization, minimizing maintenance down-time, and maximizing server manageability.
VMware ESX Server Allows You To:
• Implement server consolidation. The ESX Server consolidates applications and infrastructure services such as Exchange, SQL Server, Notes and Oracle, running on diverse operating systems onto fewer highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers, including blade servers. • Respond faster with virtual infrastructure. VMware Virtual Infrastructure Nodes (comprising ESX Server, VMware Virtual SMP™, VMotion™ and a VirtualCenter Agent) can be deployed and managed with VMware VirtualCenter to transform your IT infrastructure into a virtual infrastructure. VMware virtual infrastructure allows IT organizations to respond faster to business demands with instant provisioning of virtual machines and dynamic resource allocation to those virtual machines as business needs change. • Dramatically improve and lower the cost of disaster recovery capability. Deploying the ESX Server and VirtualCenter creates a unified disaster recovery (DR) platform that allows many production servers to be recovered on a single DR server, without the need for costly one-to-one mapping of production and DR servers. Hardware-independent ESX Server virtual machines eliminate the need to maintain identical hardware at production and DR sites.
How Does VMware ESX Server Work?
The ESX Server uses a unique bare-metal architecture that inserts a small and highly robust virtualization layer between the x86 server hardware and the virtual machines, transforming physical systems into pools of logical computing resources.
The ESX Server can host multiple differing operating systems and applications that run concurrently in isolated virtual machines. System resources are dynamically allocated to each virtual machine based on need and configured service-level guarantees, providing mainframe-class control and capacity utilization of x86 servers. Its bare-metal design gives the ESX Server complete control over the server and avoids the performance overhead, availability concerns, and costs of server virtualization architectures built on a host operating system.
How Virtualization Helps Business Continuity Pain Points in Current Implementations of Business Continuity. There are many varied tools available for business continuity, however, due to the specifics of the Windows operating system design, even the most advanced tools can only provide a seamless restoration when the target and source physical platforms are identical. Maintaining identical physical platforms at the failover site means lock-step hardware upgrades in the primary and fail-over locations, which is prohibitively expensive. If no failover site is available, it can be impossible to locate identical hardware. Even hardware of the same series that is purchased from the same manufacturer is likely to have different firmware revisions, stepping levels, BIOS settings, or support lifecycles. Restoration to different platforms is often unreliable and includes complex manual steps. These manual elements and the need to troubleshoot problems cause long recovery times and lack of replication.
To assist enterprises in disaster recovery planning, operating system vendors, applications vendors, and backup management software vendors have developed specialized APIs, tools, and best practices. As a rule, these practices involve separate processes for backing up and restoring system information, OS information, applications, and data. Some applications and data, for example Microsoft Exchange, have modules that exhibit significantly different behavior, requiring each module to have a different disaster recovery strategy. Furthermore, each mission critical application has a different backup and recovery API. The differences are especially significant if the application needs to remain accessible for the duration of the backup. With a plurality of tools, enterprise IT managers have to learn new tools and design new strategies for each of the applications covered by the disaster recovery strategy. To complicate the situation even more, the methodologies and the APIs can change completely from one version of the application to the next. For example, a disaster recovery strategy for Exchange 2003, based on native Exchange APIs is entirely different than a disaster recovery strategy for Exchange 2000. Because of the differences in applications and tools, disaster recovery strategy often includes several application-specific plans. Each plan has variations which have to be tested. In addition, if the strategy does not include a failover site, locating hardware to test the recovery can be a challenge.
Built-in Continuous Availability Virtual Infrastructure changes the way information systems are architected. Features such as migration of virtual machines between any virtualization platforms, snap shooting, and VMotion creates environments where outages are limited to having to restart a virtual machine at most. Customers who wish to implement continuous availability solutions based on virtual infrastructure have several options. For a continuous availability solution to guard against application or hardware failure, customers can use VirtualCenter to monitor a warning site, then migrate the failed application to another platform before catastrophic failure. For a more robust continuous availability solution without application interruption, N+1 clustering between virtual machines hosted on different physical hardware platforms can be implemented. Finally, if regional disasters are a concern, Virtual Infrastructure in conjunction with SAN and data replication technology offers the highest degree of protection. Customers can use data replication between primary and failover storage arrays and bring up virtual machines at the consolidated failover site.
One of the main benefits of virtualization for business continuity is independence of the recovery process from the recovery hardware. Because virtual machines encapsulate the complete environment including data, application, operating systems, BIOS, and virtualized hardware, applications can be restored to any hardware with a virtualization platform without concern for the differences in underlying hardware. The physical world limitation of having to restore to an identical platform does not apply.
Not only does hardware independence allow IT managers to eliminate manual processes associated with adjusting drivers and BIOS versions to reflect the change in platform, it also eliminates Windows registry issues and plug-and-play issues.
VMware Enterprise customers actively take advantage of VMware consolidation benefits for their production and staging servers. The consolidation benefits are even greater for the failover hardware. Because it is extremely unlikely that all the workloads will fail at once and it is often acceptable to provide somewhat lower application performance in the failover facility on a temporary basis, customers experience a consolidation ratio of failover equipment that often reaches twice the consolidation ratio of the primary data center. The unexpected outcome of workload mobility and high hardware consolidation is that enterprises are able to oversubscribe hardware to multiple workloads with very little performance impact, which in turn makes in-sourcing a disaster recovery model much more economically attractive.
Virtualization enables IT managers to create a cluster between a physical machine running mission critical workloads and a similarly configured virtual machine. The virtual machines do not consume computing resources in standby mode and can be consolidated to one or a few physical platforms at a very high consolidation ratio. As a result, the enterprise is able to realize high availability (HA) benefits without having to invest in twice the amount of hardware or having to manage and patch sprawling servers. Redundancy is reduced from 2N to N+1. Physical to virtual machine clustering supports the same clustering software as physical to physical machine clustering. In fact, the same clustering software is supported for virtual machines as for their physical equivalent including Microsoft clustering, Veritas clustering, and Legato AAM, so no IT ramp-up is required. At the same time, reduced cost allows implementation of HA and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for more workloads.
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