Virtualisation Technology is changing the way many organisations approach the provisioning, management and control of their IT infrastructures. Securelinx currently supports two virtualization technology platforms – VMware & XEN – and our experience in both these technologies, their comparative capabilities, ideal use and adoption requirements, enables us to advise and assist customers in platform choice and best practices for roll-outs, support etc.
Virtualisation Use Cases:
The traditional “one application per server” provisioning approach has led to a significant and sustained growth in server real estate over time, an outcome commonly referred to as “server sprawl”. Today, many organisations face significant operational inefficiencies and cost challenges in managing this server sprawl. The upkeep and maintenance of disparate server resources is both costly in terms of running costs (cooling/electric/floor space etc.) and is fundamentally inefficient with CPU performance typically down as low as 10-20% per individual server.
Consolidation:
The use of virtualisation – enabling multiple servers and services to co-exist on a single platform -can greatly reduce server numbers while at the same time help increase CPU usage. Consolidation can significantly reduce operating costs and offers numerous additional benefits such as containment and disaster recovery options.
Containment:
The practice of continuously purchasing platforms to satisfy a new line of business application adds to server proliferation. By contrast however, and by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single virtualised environment, server containment is facilitated and new applications can be rapidly provisioned on existing hardware. This tends to make for one of the fastest ways by which an organisation realizes its return on investment from a virtualisation strategy.
Disaster Recovery:
The ability to ensure that your IT resources remain available following a major interruption event is referred to as disaster recovery. Virtualisation technologies can assist in this regard – given that rapid re-provision and relocation services (to alternative servers and server locations) is a standard feature and benefit of virtualisation.
With both VMware Certified Professional (VCP) and VMware Sales Professional (VSP) accreditations our team is well placed to architect and deliver virtualisation solutions from VMware – the market leading virtualisation solution Vendor. Our deployment experience of ESX enterprise solutions, both for HA, Vmotion and DRS are well established, while our real world experience of integrating VMware’s solutions into both iSCSI and SAN environments is particularly well regarded.
XEN is a highly robust, well-engineered open source virtualisation platform that is available as standard within enterprise Linux distributions such as Novell’s SuSE Linux and Red Hat’s Advanced Platform.
XEN offers a cost effective way to deploy virtualisation. The interoperability agreement between Novell and Microsoft ensures full support for all Microsoft platforms virtualised on XEN – with SuSE Linux and Novell’s acquisition of virtualisation Vendor Platespin, further enhancing this solution portfolio.
