MANILA, Philippines --- Since it took off just a few years ago, virtualisation has proved itself beneficial to enterprises. Besides helping to simplify physical infrastructure and lower TCO, it can speed up service delivery, improve IT and enterprise agility, boost infrastructure scalability, resilience and reliability, enhance security and outage recovery, and lay a foundation for cloud computing.
Not surprisingly, the adoption rate for virtualisation is robust: IDC research shows the number of virtual servers is growing rapidly, with growth far outpacing that for physical servers. About 25–30% of all servers have been or are being virtualised worldwide and IDC expects the figure to grow to nearly 50% by next year.
Every enterprise embarking on virtualisation wants to be able to realise and maximise its benefits quickly. However, building virtual infrastructure can be a complex and lengthy process. The build process starts with the design of the system architecture, followed by an examination of the use cases to be supported by the virtual environment. The selection and proof-of-concept testing of virtualisation software to meet these use cases, as well as hosting hardware, comes next.
Once software and hardware have been procured, the enterprise needs to migrate its existing servers to the new virtualised environment. This key step involves configuring virtual servers, consolidating workloads from multiple physical servers, integrating the virtual servers with physical ones, adding memory and I/O if necessary, and so on, with tests interspersed between the various tasks and post-migration. Once migration is complete, the enterprise then needs to decide how it wants to administer the new environment: are the management tools for the virtualisation product sufficient or is there a need for more general system management tools?
Setbacks of DIY Approach
It is possible for enterprises to build virtual infrastructure on their own without outside help, provided their IT organisations have decent-sized budgets and the specific skills related to virtualisation. However, where budget dollars and the necessary skills are in short supply, as in many enterprises, achieving virtual capability can be not just complex and lengthy but painful as well, especially for those with smallish IT teams and remote offices that lack any on-site IT support.
While there is always the option of using consultants and systems integrators to supplement in-house staff, the approach can be expensive and time-consuming.
Enterprises that choose to build virtual infrastructure on their own often run into unforeseen obstacles in the design, test, procurement, integration and migration phases. More often than not, these obstacles cause what is know as virtualisation stall, where projects take longer or cost more than planned. In addition, many in-house teams end up focused on the wrong things, honing their skills on building infrastructure rather than running applications that generate value for their customers.
What Goes Into a Dell vStart Solution
Each of the three Dell vStart configurations is shipped straight from the factory as a single, pre-built, pre-cabled, pre-labeled, pre-tested rack that includes:
• Multiple high-performance Dell PowerEdge servers to host virtual machines
• A Dell PowerEdge server dedicated to managing the virtual environment
• A Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage area network
• Dell PowerConnect switches
• Dell power distribution and rack hardware
• Management tools (plug-in for VMware vCentre, Dell OpenManage and Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Toolkit)
Also included are deployment services and three years of Dell ProSupport service.
Dell vStart
To help enterprises fast-track their way to a virtualised environment and accelerate time to benefit, Dell has innovated a ready-to-run solution that enables them to avoid the problems commonly faced when building virtual infrastructure. Called Dell vStart, the solution is prebuilt, preconfigured, pretested and preassembled and contains all of the server, storage, networking, and management extensions needed to go virtual.
Dell vStart is offered in three configurations – vStart 50, vStart 100 and vStart 200 – that support up to 50, 100 and 200 virtual machines, respectively. The configurations are further distinguished by their storage capacity and their support for either the VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
“Dell vStart is a great way to acquire virtual infrastructure without the complexity, resources and time associated with the on-site assembly approach. We’ve seen the challenges that can stand between the business and an effective virtualisation solution, and we’ve leveraged our deep expertise and experience in virtualisation to create a simpler path for our customers,” said CHRISTOPHER S. PAPA, COUNTRY MANAGER, Dell Philippines.
“It’s pretty much plug and play. Customers simply pick the Dell vStart configuration best suited for their workload needs. And with deployment services included with every vStart, customers can have their virtualisation environment up and running in days rather than months.” said CHRISTOPHER S. PAPA, COUNTRY MANAGER, Dell Philippines.
As for day-to-day administration of the virtual infrastructure post-implementation, the included software makes it easy to manage hardware infrastructure easily and without additional consoles or interfaces to learn or manage. Further benefit comes from having a single point of accountability. Scalability is almost effortless – as their needs grow, customers simply add servers or storage arrays or add more vStart racks.
Besides enabling enterprises to quickly implement virtualised environments, Dell vStart can also be deployed to refresh aging servers, virtualise branch offices or specific departments, support mission-critical applications, and create infrastructure for private clouds.
Brodart Goes Virtual With vStart
Based in Pennsylvania, USA, Brodart Co. provides library solutions ranging from shelf-ready books to electronic ordering systems and furniture. Most of its servers were nearing end of life and the plan was to migrate to a virtual environment. As Brodart’s small IT staff had enough on its hands, the wish was for a virtualised server infrastructure that could be implemented quickly, with low risk and complexity during the critical migration phase.
Of the solutions Brodart evaluated, only Dell vStart 100 met these criteria. The company worked with a Dell partner to deploy the solution and Brad Huyck, Brodart’s manager for IT operations, was pleasantly surprised when the team had virtual servers up and running within the first week of delivery.
“All we had to do was plug it in. Just four weeks after we made the purchase, we were already achieving business value. That’s about six times faster than I expected. The benefits that we saw in the first week were just through the roof.”
Compared with its previous setup, Brodart can now deploy a new server at least 10 times faster and recover data much faster and more conveniently by restoring from point-in-time snapshots of virtual servers.
article source: mb.com.ph
