Why virtualize?
Virtualisation is a practical way to fully utilise your server’s potential; increasing the security of your data, sharing workloads and reducing your overall IT costs.
It’s a way of capitalising on a server’s potential without investing in additional hardware. Virtualisation allows you to reduce the amount of physical IT hardware your business needs to operate and grow, which in turn reduces the time and cost involved in deployment of new servers, maintenance and upgrades.
How does virtualisation work?
The process of virtualizing your Linux environment and other servers is achieved using VMware. VMware is a hypervisor installed on the physical server as the ‘host’ operating system. VMware controls the hardware and allows for multiple ‘guest’ operating systems to run at the same time. One great advantage of virtualisation with VMware, is that it fully supports SCO OpenServer definitive, SUSE, Redhat and other Linux OS’s. It also allows legacy software to be fully virtualized and deployed on new hardware.
What can you expect from VMware virtualisation software?
- Flexibility – hardware can be added on demand and growth in the system accommodated without any downtime.
- Efficiency – save deployment time, server room space and money on utility bills by utilising a server’s full capacity.
- Security – increased security of new servers as well as the option to move into a datacentre (which improves your data security).
- Recovery – compatible with Quest Rapid Recovery to backup and quickly recover your data in the event of an outage, attack or other disaster.
- Economy – reduced amounts of hardware means reduced expense on hardware and software replacements and updates as well as systems management and maintenance.
Customer Case Study – ASL virtualize the server environment and SCO OpenServer for Music Exchange
Our client, Music Exchange, came to us with their virtualisation needs.
Problem: Music Exchange had a Microsoft and SCO environment with multiple servers that they wanted to upgrade and make more resilient.
ASL’s solution: We recommended a highly available VMware platform solution from Dell. This hardware system, along with Quest Rapid Recovery, allows for a fault tolerant on-premise server environment with on-site recoverability, where data can be restored to any point in time. It replicates the critical data to our secure off-site datacentre, thus protecting the data in case of disaster.
Benefits: In the event of hardware failure, the server environment will immediately bring up the failed ‘guest’ servers on the remaining hardware, therefore minimising the downtime to minutes rather than days. In the event of a complete disaster, all replicated data can be used to recreate the server environment in our secure datacentre and allows the customer to have remote access to this completely hosted system within a few hours. Not only does this save money on actual physical server hardware, but the business operates more efficiently and securely than before.
To find out about the benefits of virtualisation, contact ASL on 0345 862 0350.
