Set Goals for VT


Set goals for the implementation of virtualization technology in the enterprise. To have a successful rollout, it is necessary to have measurable goals against which you can gauge your project.


Create goals in terms of quantifiable measures of increased efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness. VMware virtual infrastructure software offers numerous benefits that increase the efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness of IT infrastructure:

  • Respond faster to business needs. With VMware VirtualCenter management capabilities, server-provisioning time can often be reduced from weeks to minutes. Virtual machines can be added as needed, allowing IT administrators to quickly respond to a variety of situations, including increased demand for capacity, new requests for IT services, and the need for additional resources and performance. Using VMware, administrators can create server templates to ensure that server configurations for newly added virtual machines are consistent with departmental policies.
  • Lower TCO through server consolidation and streamlined systems management. In a large data center, VMware software can enable significant hardware and operating-cost savings through server consolidation. For example, with VMware ESX Server, more than 20 separate servers (operating systems and associated applications) can be hosted on one 8-way server. Higher consolidation ratios can be achieved on 16-way and larger server platforms. No software migration is required, making the process very straightforward. This approach enables enterprises to consolidate mission-critical applications and services running on various operating systems onto fewer, more scalable and reliable enterprise-class servers, including blade servers. As a result, IT managers can streamline data-center operations, reduce hardware requirements, and minimize unused capacity while maintaining application service-level agreements, simply by balancing workloads and adjusting the resources dedicated to each virtual machine. The result: a lower cost to acquire, deploy, manage, and operate needed IT resources.
  • Develop and test software more efficiently. By consol idating multiple test and development servers onto fewer physical servers, IT developers can test new enterprise applications in large-scale test configurations without incurring the cost or resource burden of provisioning and configuring a large number of physical servers.
  • Create cost-effective business continuity and disaster-recovery solutions. Business continuity means maintaining the availability of mission-critical applications in the face of maintenance needs, hardware failures, and adverse events. VMotion technology allows administrators to move live applications on a virtual machine from one physical server to another physical server before bringing the primary server down for maintenance. In this way, VMware virtualization software can dramatically improve application availability and make updates to business-critical servers possible without a disruption in service. In addition, virtual machines can be clustered to further increase application availability by providing automatic failover.

    VMware software can also help administrators implement a cost-effective disaster recovery solution. In the event of a disaster, multiple production workloads that were running on virtual machines on physical servers can be recovered in minutes, simply by copying the virtual machine images to a physical server at the disaster recovery site and then restarting the virtual machines on that server. Using virtual infrastructure in this way can provide business continuity while eliminating the need to maintain identical hardware at both the production and disaster recovery sites.
  • Migrate legacy and custom applications. Migrating customized enterprise applications can be problematic, so many organizations require their legacy systems to remain operational at least until the transition is complete. Because virtual machines operate independently of physical hardware and multiple virtual machines can run on a single physical server, IT administrators can protect critical data and maintain new and old systems simultaneously. This can be accomplished by running these systems in secure virtual machines at near-native performance levels on standard, Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers.



