White Papers

Among the leading business challenges confronting CIOs and IT managers today are: cost-effective utilization of IT infrastructure; responsiveness in supporting new business initiatives; and flexibility in adapting to organizational chages. Driving an additional sense of urgency is the continued climate of IT budget constraints and more stringent regulatory requirements. Virtualization is a fundamental technological innovation that allows skilled IT mangers to deploy creative solutions to such business challenges.

Virtualization has been a major buzzword in the IT world for a few years. Now the buzz is getting bigger, with the release of Windows Server 2008 and the impending integration of the Hyper-V virtualization component (formerly called Viridian), expected this summer. Of course, Microsoft already has Virtual Server and Virtual PC, as well as stiff competition on the virtualization front from VMWare and Citrix/XenSource.

The playing field for server virtualization has become much more crowded over the last few years. Competition is always good for a market as more choices always push vendors into providing better products at more competitive prices. It can be very time consuming to digest each vendor’s marketing materials to come to the right solution for your organization. This checklist provides a list of the main considerations and basic differences between the technologies to provide a starting point for technology evaluation. The three main technologies discussed in this analysis are: hardware virtualization, para-virtualization and OS virtualization.

Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in IT these days, but the technology brings with it new terminology that can be confusing. Here are some common virtualization-related terms and their meanings.

Virtualization provides opportunies to improve service levels and lower capital and operating costs to provide and maintain IT infastructure. Over the pat five years many organizations have specifically deployed VMware infrastruture software on industry standard systems to significantly reduce their hardware, data center and operational coasts – many report 70-80% costs savings and 3-6 month ROI periods – while achieving unexpected gains in operational flexibility, efficiency, and agiliy. To date over one million server workloads have been virtualized on this infrastructure. 90% of our customers are now rolling out this infrastructure for production usage.

Using virtualization of hardware can save a bundle, when having to test new software releases or software patches. But software that provides virtualized hardware can also save a bundle if you know how licensing works on virtual hosts. There are some very attractive license bundle pricing options that make virtualization even more attractive.

There is a lot of potential value that can be derived from virtualization but the key to maximizing that value is to understand what the expectations and business drivers are. Each client planning virtualization adopts one or more goals based upon product claims, press coverage, and industry peer input. One common virtualization goal is to improve the way in which IT manages its resources.

Computer data centers are continually expanding and increasing in complexity. This complexity, added to the need to reduce IT budgets while increasing IT services and agility, has caused many companies to turn to server virtualization. Server virtualization allows multiple application servers to be virtualized on a physical server system, thereby reducing the number of servers in the data center while increasing utilization.

Hypervisor technology is software on which multiple virtual machines can run, with the hypervisor layer controlling the hardware and allocating resources to each VM operating system. Hyper-V is the virtualization platform that is included in Windows Server 2008. Microsoft also recently released a standalone version, called Hyper-V Server 2008, that’s available as a free download from the Microsoft Web site.

Virtualization is one of the hottest trends in information technology today. This is no accident. While a variety of technologies fall under the virtualization umbrella, all of them are changing the IT world in significant ways.

One of the biggest features of Windows Server 2008 isn’t even really in Server 2008 yet: Hyper-V, the new virtualization platform (formerly code-named Viridian). But the technology has reached the release candidate stage at this writing (download it for free from Microsoft’s website; hunt for KB949219), and it’s such an important feature that we thought it would be worthwhile exploring the background of the technology – so that when it does make it into your hands, you’ll know how it is different from the virtualization solutions you may have already seen or used.