Data Center Virtualization Strategies

Businesses implementing PTS recommended virtualization strategies experience energy savings, reduced footprint, faster application and service delivery, fuller IT management automation, and higher levels of business continuity.

Outcomes of this consulting program lead to:

• Targeted Server Consolidation & Optimization. Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher server utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and avoiding the need for one server for each application model. However, it is critical to make wise choices for which applications and servers can be housed together when planning to perform virtualization.
• Infrastructure Cost Reduction. With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power, and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.
• Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness. Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance.
• Improved Desktop Manageability & Security. Deploy, manage, and monitor secure enterprise desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with faster deployment of desktops and few support calls due to application conflicts.
• Improved Business Continuity. Eliminate planned downtime and recover more quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no service interruption.
• Aggressive Versus Moderate Scenarios for Virtualization. Look at two approaches to roll out virtualization to the enterprise considering hardware capacity, resource utilization, candidate system selection, placement rules, hardware selection, system exceptions, software/application usage reports, software profiling, and system placement among other considerations.

PTS’ Data Center Virtualization Strategies service serves as a ‘recommendations’ phase in the progression and evolution of a data center as it expands. The service can work in conjunction with other PTS solutions such as Data Center Optimization, Consolidation, and Relocation.

Desktop virtualization depends heavily on application analysis. Application analysis helps build virtual machine templates with the correct combination of applications and proper computational resource sizes to match the user population. Application analysis can also benefit system virtualization. This is especially true with web-based services.

Application analysis is achieved through multiple steps. Applications and application usage must be collected, filtered, and sorted into images. After images are generated, users are mapped to those images, and virtual machine templates are sized. The final step is to recommend the placement of users on ESX hosts.