Achieving Balance-Sheet Business Value with Virtualized ... · deploy virtualization solutions quickly virtualization technologies can address spe and cost-effectively. and assessment
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Transforming administration-intensive physical data centers into optimized, cost-effective virtualized infrastructures is not something most organizations do every day. By drawing on best practices culled from successful customer engagements around the world, Dell Infrastructure Consulting Services can help organizations maximize IT resources, simplify server management, and sustain value across the overall IT infrastructure.
Achieving Balance-Sheet Business Value with Virtualized Server Solutions
Dell Infrastructure consultIng servIces
IT infrastructures have become central to enterprise
operations in virtually every industry—which is why
data center flexibility, simplicity, and costs have sur-
faced as top executive concerns. To help enterprises
remain competitive and support these priorities, IT orga-
nizations must address a variety of challenges. Executives
are demanding improved control of infrastructure manage-
ment costs, including power and cooling. Therefore, IT
organizations are under pressure to reduce the volume of
hardware required to support their organizations and drive
cost savings. In addition, IT infrastructures must meet
regulatory requirements for high availability and business
continuity and comply with strict service-level agreements
(SLAs) with their constituents.
Under pressure to reduce costs by transforming their
operations, IT organizations must also increase infrastructure
flexibility to respond quickly to enterprise demands. System
administration efforts, and therefore costs, must be reduced
despite accelerating requirements for change management.
IT organizations must drive efficient use of system resources
to avoid buying new equipment when current assets are
underutilized. At the same time, these organizations must
design systems that can protect uptime and availability in
the face of isolated component failure or broad disaster.
In the past few years, virtualization has become a
preferred approach to consolidating data centers and
Delivering broad expertiseDell Services offers six key areas of virtualiza-
tion expertise.
Physical-to-virtual migration. Converting a
set of physical servers to virtual machines
(VMs) that run on a reduced number of physical
servers can help simplify administrative efforts.
Consolidation also helps lower acquisition
costs, enabling organizations to buy fewer
physical servers during the next system refresh
than they would otherwise. Furthermore, con-
solidation through virtualization can help
reduce transition risks and optimize use of sys-
tems resources.
High availability. Addressing fault toler-
ance and resiliency in the server infrastructure
can help ensure that SLAs are met. High avail-
ability is commonly achieved by avoiding
single points of failure—for example, using
multiple network interface cards or host bus
adapters, or implementing clusters running
the Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® operating
systems. VMs also enable fast recovery from
hardware failure, which helps avoid unplanned
downtime and enhances service levels.
Backup and recovery. Optimizing backup
and recovery processes in a virtualized server
environment can significantly reduce the
number of backup agents in the IT infrastruc-
ture. This approach also eases the risk of end-
user disruption or system administration
problems and helps reduce network traffic by
backing up data directly from the storage area
network (SAN). The Dell Services team offers
knowledge transfer to help optimize backup
and recovery processes in a virtualized server
environment.
Configuration management and monitor-ing. Dell Services provides IT departments
with the tools they need to track which VMs
run on which physical servers. By monitoring
resource utilization, IT administrators can
decide whether to balance workloads by
moving VMs from one server to another. Dell
65www.dell.com/powersolutions
ApplicationOS
Microsoft Exchangeserver
ApplicationOS
Print server
ApplicationOS
Customer relationshipmanagement server
ApplicationOS
Database server
ApplicationOS
Web server
ApplicationOS
File server
VM
VMware ESX server
VM VM VM
VM
VMware ESX server
VM
VM
VMware ESX server
VM VM
Before virtualization after virtualization
servers 800 50
storage Direct attach storage Tiered SAN and network attached storage
network 2,500 cables and ports 250 cables and ports
facilities 180 racks and 300 power whips 10 racks and 20 power whips
Figure 1. Virtualization enables server consolidation, flexibility, and availability
Dell Services intellectual property for virtualizationThe intellectual property used by Dell Services virtualization consultants is continuously updated to help meet specific organizational needs. This com-pendious resource includes:
• More than 600 pages of in-depth documentation
• Best practices gathered from around the world
• Dell Virtualization Reference Architecture and collaboration with Dell Solutions Engineering