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To meet the constant demand to deploy, maintain and grow a broad array of services and applications, IT organizations must continually add new servers. However, as a consequence of purchasing more and more servers, organizations face a growing server sprawl presenting challenges that include:
- Rising costs. In addition to the expense of adding new servers, organizations face the added costs associated with increasing hardware—rising costs for power, cooling, network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, server administration, data center upgrades and new data centers.
- Poor return on investment. The common practice of dedicating a single server to each x86 application and sizing it for peak loads has led to severe underutilization of server assets in most data centers. IDC estimates that there is currently more than $140 billion in server overcapacity, or a three-year supply of server capacity.2 While servers typically run at 5-15% CPU utilization, traditional business process and technology limitations make it difficult to improve these utilization rates.
- Decreasing manageability. Managing servers becomes increasingly difficult as the number of servers grows and the number of applications continue to multiply. Adding to that challenge is the heterogeneous mix of hardware, server models, operating systems and configurations that IT departments need to support.
- Reduced efficiency. As server sprawl increases, IT organizations are forced to spend more time on reactive tasks such as server provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance. This leaves less time for proactive, strategic projects to improve infrastructure and service levels.
Consolidating and Containing Servers
Consolidation and containment solutions implemented with VMware Infrastructure meet the challenges of server sprawl and underutilization by reducing hardware and operating costs by as much as 50%. A virtual infrastructure also simplifies server deployment and automates resource management to optimize capacity and infrastructure management. VMware virtualization technology makes it possible to package a complete x86 server—hardware, operating system, applications, and configurations—into a portable virt ual machine package. Multiple virtual machines can then run simultaneously and independently on a single x86 server with consolidation ratios often exceeding 5 virtual machines per host processor.
Over 40% of VMware’s enterprise customers have made virtual machines the default platform for all newly provisioned servers. Fulfilling requests for new servers with virtual machines does not require purchasing new physical servers and improves utilization.
Maximize Resources through Virtualization
VMware technology is used by more than 20,000 enterprise customers and provides a simple, proven solution for consolidating servers. Each workload that previously required a dedicated physical server can be placed in a virtual machine, making it simple to consolidate multiple workloads onto each physical server. The conversion process is made simple with VMware® Converter, which automates the conversion of Windows servers into virtual machines. In addition to consolidating servers today, implementing VMware virtual infrastructure provides a solution to contain future growth. More than 40% of VMware customers have made virtual machines the default platform for all newly provisioned servers. Fulfilling requests for new servers with virtual machines defers the need to purchase new servers and improves utilization. This ability makes it possible to accurately forecast and strategically manage future growth in computing capacity.
Consolidating applications and hardware is the first step to creating IT infrastructure that can better respond to business needs and provide more reliable and robust services.
Simplify Infrastructure Management with VMware VirtualCenter
VMware Infrastructure offers a level of control not possible with other virtualization solutions. It gives complete visibility into an organization’s virtual resources, letting the IT department monitor and maintain high levels of service across the virtual infrastructure.
VMware technology makes it fast and simple to provision new server applications using virtual machine templates. These templates are reusable images that allow IT organizations to eliminate many repetitive installation and configuration tasks. When coupled with the hardware independence made possible by virtualization, virtual machine templates can reduce the time it takes to deploy new IT services by as much as 50% - 70%. VMware Infrastructure provides the tools to monitor and analyze virtual machines, resource pools, server utilization and availability with detailed performance graphs. Performance metrics can be defined with several levels of granularity and can be viewed in real time, or across a specified time interval.
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