Server Virtualisation
Server Virtualisation has been around for a long time and is now, arguably, the accepted standard way of doing server builds in preference to direct install on physical hardware.
ST-FOUR were one of the first UK VMware Enterprise partners and we have seen a lot of changes in the product since 2004 all of them good.
VMware is the market leader in server virtualisation for a reason, they have by far the best product, their support is excellent and the product constantly improves, not just between versions but with every service pack. VMware has more built in features than any of it's rivals and has more 3rd party software available and more hardware integration and support too.
Below is a graphical representation of the basic feature sets included in VMware Enterprise Plus.
So we have stated that VMware is the best however that still does not give you a reason to virtualise, well a few years ago that would have been the major question however nowadays the question is not so much "Why Virtualise?" and is rather "How shall I virtualise?" however this is a page about the benefits ofserver virtualisation so here is our personal list of the top benefits of server virtualisation:
- Save Money - Reducing the number of physical servers you own reduces hardware renewal and maintenance costs, rack space, power consumption, cooling costs and often licensing costs.
- More Flexibility - Not having to wait to get approval to buy server kit gives total flexibility to build new servers as you need them reducing project lag significantly.
- More Redundancy - If you do it right (and you should always do it right) moving from single server point to failure to a virtualised clustered SAN builds in several extra layers of redundancy that do not exist for standalone servers
- Future proofing.
OK so 1-3 are pretty straightforward and obvious but what in point 4, Future proofing, about?
Virtualising your server estate with VMware isn't just about running multiple servers on one physical server, what it's mainly about is completely changing the platform your estate runs on to a much more flexible, modular, easier to enhance platform.
Take for example Disaster Recovery, it's quite complex and expensive with standalone servers or even in SAN environments the addition of the virtualisation layer allows us to plug in products that don't have to be hardware vendor specific, this reduces the replication and target hardware costs of Disaster Recovery by a huge magnitude.
Future migration are also much more straightforward and cost effective, as your Virtualised Server OS uses a generic VMware driver set upgrading a server as no impact on your systems whatsoever
New technologies are now also being designed around a VMware virtualised server rather than physical servers, there are many 3rd party monitoring tools that plug in to the VMware hypervisor meaning that you don't need agents on each of your servers and as they are talking to the underlying VMware software they are giving cleaner results without problems of driver of other software contaminations, other products do the same, most Backup Software vendors now have "OS agent-less" backups of your servers.
VMware vShield Endpoint provides a platform for 3rd party Anti Virus companies to scan your virtualised desktops or servers without the need to install an Anti-Virus agent taking away one of the major headaches of running a Windows OS. The basic principal is that you build a dedicated virtualised AV server which communicate with the vSphere hypervisor via a vShield Endpoint kernel module, this allows scanning for virus and malware threats at the hypervisor layer before the threat even reaches the virtual machine.
With new products coming out all the time you can be confident that if you have a VMware virtualised datacenter you will be able to take advantage of them before anyone else.