Server Virtualisation Technology

Virtualisation allows multiple virtual machines, with different operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine without interference. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (for example, RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalised set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components.

Virtual machines are encapsulated into files, making it possible to rapidly save, copy and provision a virtual machine. Full systems (fully configured applications, operating systems, BIOS and virtual hardware) can be moved, within seconds, from one physical server to another for zero-downtime maintenance and continuous workload consolidation.

Each year hundreds of companies will experience significant service interruptions. These businesses will be threatened by a range of problems including software failures, hardware failures, viruses, and more.

Using virtual infrastructure, IT managers can improve all aspects of business continuity by realising:

• Simpler and more reliable data protection
• High availability through reduced planned and unplanned downtime
• Faster, more flexible, and more reliable disaster recovery at a lower cost

Virtualisation Software for Business

VMware virtual infrastructure software is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. Find out how VMware software can help consolidate servers, optimise software development and provide affordable business continuity.

Achieve Simple and Reliable Data Protection

Data protection is among the most crucial elements of data centre management. VMware virtual infrastructure software provides many different capabilities to improve data protection. The flexibility provided by VMware software allows backup and restore processes that fit into your existing methodologies and procedures.

VMware virtual infrastructure makes it possible to ensure protection of application and system data with your existing backup tools and methodologies as well as with tools specifically designed for virtualised environments. Using their existing backup software from leading vendors, organisations can back up their data by running backup software in virtual machines using the same methodologies used for physical machines. Users can also choose to take full-image backups by using third-party backup products that capture an entire virtual machine as a small number of files.

Reliable Data Protection with Vmware

VMware Consolidated Backup provides an easy to use, centralised backup facility for VMware Infrastructure 3. It enables virtual machine contents to be backed up from a centralised Microsoft Windows 2003 proxy server rather than directly from VMware ESX Server.

Consolidated Backup allows IT organisations to:

• Reduce the load on ESX Server by allowing it to run more efficiently and run more virtual machines.
• Improve manageability of IT resources by using a single agent running on the proxy server rather than an agent on every virtual machine.
• Eliminate backup traffic on the local area network by utilising Fibre Channel tape devices for virtual machine backups.

Vmware Will Slash Planned Downtime

Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings with it considerable costs. However, solutions to ensure higher levels of availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and difficult to manage.

VMware software makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important applications. With VMware virtual infrastructure, organisations can easily increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications as well as provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost effectively. VMware virtual infrastructure makes is possible to slash planned downtime, prevent unplanned downtime, and recover rapidly from outages.

With VMware virtual infrastructure, customers have been able to:

• Provide higher availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications
• Reduce planned maintenance downtime to ZERO for common maintenance operations
• Provide automatic restart of systems in the case of server failure

Slash Planned Downtime

Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of datacentre downtime. Hardware maintenance, server migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimise the impact of this downtime, organisations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule downtime windows.

VMware Infrastructure makes it possible for organisations to dramatically reduce planned downtime. Because workloads in a VMware Infrastructure environment can be dynamically moved to different physical servers without downtime or service interruption, server maintenance can be performed without requiring application and service downtime.

With VMware Infrastructure organisations can:

• Eliminate downtime for common maintenance operations
• Eliminate planned maintenance windows
• Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services

Prevent Unplanned Downtime

VMware Infrastructure builds important fault tolerance capabilities into datacentre infrastructure. Because they are part of virtual infrastructure, these capabilities are transparent to the operating system and applications running in virtual machines. These features can be easily configured and can be utilised by all of the virtual machines on a physical system, reducing the cost and complexity of providing higher availability. Key fault-tolerance capabilities built into VMware Infrastructure include:

• Network interface teaming to provide tolerance of individual network card failures
• Storage multi-pathing to tolerate storage path failures

Ensure Rapid Recovery from Outages

VMware software makes possible rapid and automated restart and failover without the cost or complexity of solutions used with physical infrastructure. Virtual machines are hardware-independent and can share physical resources, thus failover can be implemented without requiring dedicated, identical standby hardware and the added complexity of maintaining identical configurations.

For server failures, VMware HA – a component of VMware Infrastructure 3 – ensures rapid, automated restart of virtual machines. VMware HA automatically and intelligently restarts affected virtual machines on other production servers. As a part of virtual infrastructure, VMware HA can be easily configured for a server without dependencies on operating system, applications, or physical hardware.

Customers can also use third-party clustering software in virtual environments by clustering virtual machines with other virtual machines or clustering physical machines with other physical machines. VMware software makes it possible to implement clustering without requiring the cost of identical servers, without the complexity of rebuilding clustering when physical hardware changes, and without the difficulty associated with testing clustering of physical systems.

Build a Rapid, Reliable and Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Solution with Wmware

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are costly, complex and frequently do not meet recovery objectives. They are costly because they require significant investments in hardware and in specialised software. Recovery frequently requires complex, time-consuming multi-step processes. Meeting recovery time objectives is difficult because of the complexity and cost of advanced solutions.

VMware virtual infrastructure provides a solution that makes it possible to implement disaster recovery plans at a significantly lower cost. Traditional disaster recovery plans require that recovery target hardware must exactly duplicate production hardware, effectively doubling hardware requirements for protected applications. In contrast, VMware virtual machines are hardware-independent and thus any physical server can serve as a recovery target for any virtual machine. As a result organisations can significantly reduce the cost of hardware for disaster recovery by repurposing underutilised existing servers for recovery targets and disaster recovery testing.

VMware virtual infrastructure also simplifies and accelerates recovery, helping IT organisations meet their time-to-recovery targets. Complex multi-step procedures using specialised software for bare-metal recovery and operating system recovery can be simplified to single-step file recovery because virtual machines are completely encapsulated in a small number of files and can be restored to any hardware. This encapsulation property also makes it possible to use third-party replication software to replicate entire virtual machines to a recovery site, reducing recovery time to just a few hours.

Finally, virtual infrastructure enables a more reliable disaster recovery plan. Because it simplifies disaster recovery processes, the ability to meet time-to-recovery targets is improved, testing of disaster recovery plans is simpler, and training personnel in disaster recovery procedures is easier. The hardware-independence of virtual machines also eliminates complications that can arise due to hardware differences between primary and recovery site hardware.

VMware virtual infrastructure enables a better disaster recovery plan whether or not organisations have virtualised their production servers. Physical servers can be recovered to virtual machine recovery targets in a "physical-to-virtual" recovery scenario, providing the benefits of simpler and hardware-independent recovery. Even greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings can be realised in a "virtual-to-virtual" recovery scenario where virtual machines in production are recovered to virtualised recovery target servers.