Virtualization
Introduction
The proven benefits of software-based server virtualization platforms over the past few years have made virtualization a mandatory technology for IT departments.
Adoption of virtualization has gained momentum because IT departments have shown that they can provide increased capacity while maintaining the same, or lower physical server count. This directly translates into lower space and energy costs.
New Management Challenges
Virtualization not only enables server consolidation, it also brings exciting new capabilities, for example the ability to create, move, copy, store and retire servers in a fraction of the time it took with the traditional model of one app / one OS / one server. However these new capabilities have created a new type of management headache for IT operators who find they are facing what is known in the virtualization industry as "virtual server sprawl".
IT Operations need to be able to answer these questions:
- Who owns this virtual machine, is it a production server, was it authorized and is it still needed?
- Is it built compliant with company policies, does it have the right security software installed?
- Is there an entry for this server in our asset or CMDB inventory?
- Will our CMDB stay up to date as these transient virtual servers come and go?
- How do we manage that server if it moves between different physical hosts?
- How do we integrate all this into our existing IT Service Management processes?
- What can we do to support high availability and disaster recovery procedures for this new technology?
If left unchecked, the capital expenditure savings which were the primary drivers for introducing virtualization technology in the first place, can easily be outweighed by the increase in operating expenditure that the management overheads add.
Effective Management Tool
With the Enigmatec virtualization solution you can:
- Prevent virtual server sprawl by managing the provisioning and lifecycle management of virtual servers.
- Reduce server provisioning times by up to 99% (months/weeks to minutes)
- Increase Administrator to Server ratio by up to 8 times, reducing the operational expenditure associated with large virtual deployments.
- Regain control of the datacenter by understanding where resources are deployed, who owns them and when resources will be returned.
- Provide integration into existing systems management processes (change, configuration etc).
- Ensure compliance through automated configuration management.
- Introduce positive working practices by getting end users to actively request extension of virtual machine leases, rather than just "hogging" resources that are no longer needed.
- Reduce capital expenditure by automatically returning expired machine resources back to resource pools.