Ixilix - Vmware Virtualization Solutions, Techniques, Assessments

Virtualization

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about virtualization. This is for good reason; virtualization has arrived at a maturity level that allows for enormous benefits at very low costs. In the simplest form, virtualization allows you to consolidate multiple pieces of hardware onto one server. Virtualization allows multiple applications to share a server without being aware that they are not the only application running. A typical stand-alone server might run at only 5%-15% capacity, while a server using virtualization can run at 60% - 85% capacity, without any noticeable degration in performance delivered to the virtual machines to the end-users or applications. Virtualization offers many benefits including:

• Disaster Recovery is a more viable solution

• Costs are reduced

• Resources are fully leveraged

• Servers are fully utilized

• Energy is saved

• Down time is minimal

How Will Virtualization Work In My Environment?

Virtualization is not a one size fits all solution. Ixilix understands this and tailors solutions to meet the needs of our customers. The performance factors along with the level of availability required will drive these decisions. Any one of these scenarios could describe your environment; we will tailor our solution to meet your company's needs.

Physical to Virtual Failover: A multi-server environment that may include any combination of email servers, application servers, file servers and web servers. You need a disaster recovery solution that provides data replication and failover capabilities, but want to reap the benefits of virtualization.

Virtual to Virtual Failover: All applications are running as virtual machines and you need a disaster recovery solution that can mimic your environment through data replication and failover capabilities.

Physical to Physical Failover: Your environment may be a mixture of physical servers and the optimal solution may not be to use virtualization in a disaster recovery site. You need a disaster recovery environment that provides data replication and failover capabilities based on the requirements for each server.

The level of availability can fluctuate within any of these environments. Depending upon your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) an optimal solution will be created for you. Ixilix will evaluate these needs by performing a Virtualization and Disaster Recovery Assessment.

Click here to learn more about Ixilix's Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery Services.

What Can Virtualization Do For Me?

Many customers ask what they can gain by virtualizing their environment. Ixilix has helped their customers obtain many rewards from virtualization.

Disaster Recovery - Disaster recovery is a more viable solution than ever before. By leveraging virtualization with asynchronous data replication and failover solutions, reliable disaster recovery becomes a reality. All of the benefits of virtualization such as reduced costs, hardware consolidation, better utilization and flexibility all add to the ease of building a disaster recovery site.

Reduce costs – Cost savings can be realized by consolidating multiple servers onto one physical server. Additionally, by reducing the number of physical servers, energy costs begin to decline substantially. Ixilix’s virtualization experts will work with you to develop a Virtualization Assessment to evaluate the best approach for consolidating your environment.

Make the most of your resources – Virtualization will allow you to reduce the number of physical servers that require constant system administration. By consolidating applications as virtual machines and eliminating all of the extra hardware, the system administrator is now free to focus on more business critical tasks.

Gain the benefits of utilization – As technology has progressed and processing power continues to climb, we find that most companies are only able to leverage approximately 5% to 15% of the processing power that is available to them. By leveraging this power across multiple applications in a virtualized environment, your business can begin to reap the benefits of continuous growth in processing power. Ultimately, utilization can increase to upwards of 60% to 85%

Go green with virtualization– Virtualization techniques reduce the number of servers required to run in an environment. By consolidating servers, the amount of energy needed is substantially reduced. The end result is less power is required of power plants and we contribute to the wellness of our environment.

Get the flexibility you need- Virtualization provides the flexibility to add virtual machines faster than would ever be possible by acquiring and setting up new hardware. You also have the ability to scale servers up or down at a much faster rate than ever before.

Minimize downtime – Virtualization software can be configured to monitor virtual machines and perform certain actions in the event of hardware, application or operating system failure. The configuration can fail over to either another virtual machine or virtual server. Downtime is reduced from hours/days to a matter of seconds.

How Do I Get Started?

Ixilix has a team of expert virtualization consultants to walk you through every step of the process. An assessment and cost benefit analysis will be performed to ensure that virtualization is right for you.

Virtualization Assessment
Ixilix understands that just because you can virtualize an entire environment does not necessarily mean that you should. It is important to evaluate the infrastructure and the business components that drive the environment. Ixilix will perform a Virtualization Assessment to gain knowledge of your business needs and the role that your infrastructure plays within your organization. Key items evaluated as part of the Virtualization Assessment include:

• Network Infrastructure

• Architectural Review

• Business Needs & Requirements

• Implementation Needs & Requirements

• Compliance & Regulation Mandates

• Budget Considerations

• Resource Requirements

• Migration Plan

As a result of the Virtualization Assessment, Ixilix will create a Virtualization Plan.

Cost Benefit Analysis
Ixilix will work with you to understand how your virtualization solution will impact your financial outlook. As part of this process, we will help you to evaluate all of the costs, the financial benefits, and ongoing considerations. An analysis will be done of the hard and soft costs and NPV to allow you forecast cash flows over the project’s lifespan.