Business Continuity using Server Virtualization

Business Objective:
Increase the availability of your key business servers without breaking the budget, maintain a simple to administer environment that also offers scalability and flexibility so you can respond to the businesses future changing needs.

Nice to haves…
Reduce the power consumption and cooling required for your server infrastructure
Increase the utilization of the server hardware so your budget works harder and goes further.

Solution:
Virtualization is widely advertised as being an excellent way of consolidating your server hardware and reducing running costs. We have discovered that while this is true for large environments (i.e. consolidating x500 servers down to x70) it is actually some of the other benefits of virtualization that mean more to mid-size organizations.

VM ware ESX offers features such as “Dynamic Resource Scheduling” for optimizing the use of your servers, automatically moving virtual servers between hosts as the demand on them changes and “High Availability” for restarting them should a host fail unexpectedly.

The best infrastructure we have found to run VM ware on is HP’s C Class blade servers, VM ware supports all main hardware vendors of course but LETN have found HP’s integration between their “System Insight Management” tools and VM ware’s “Virtual Centre” to be an invaluable combination when managing a virtualized environment. HP’s pre-failure hardware agents alert the Virtual management console which automatically migrates virtual servers off of the failing server, this delivers improved up-time especially for applications that need to run 24×7 but perhaps don’t warrant 24×7 human attention.

The High Availability features from VM ware rely on your infrastructure having centralized shared storage. Obviously if this storage is going to hold all your data and virtual server images then it is critical that it also has High Availability features plus be able to deliver reliable performance. There are several key features that LETN believe a re a must have for virtual infrastructure storage and these are:

  • Flexibility
  • Performance
  • Scalability
  • High Availability
  • Easy Management

LETN recommend that NetApp’s FAS series of storage appliances + complimentary storage applications offer all of the above required features with a very high level of protection. In particular the expansion of storage is very simple with no rebuilding of array’s required plus protecting your virtual servers is now incredibly simple using NetApp SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure which allows up to the minute snapshots of your servers throughout the day that can be restored in minutes if required. This snapshot capability is also available for critical business applications like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP and SharePoint making it incredibly easy to protect and restore your key business data.
Add to the above the FAS’s ability to Deduplicate at a block & volume level all of your data and we also find that you need to purchase less overall storage, making this storage solution (in our opinion) the best fit for virtualization available.

Key Business Benefits:

  • Increase your business continuity by reducing downtime using High Availability Features.
  • Realise the benefits of truly flexible infrastructure enabling creation of servers in 7 minutes and online scalable storage expansion with zero downtime.
  • Get the most from your infrastructure using optimization features to ensure that your data is Deduplicated and that your Virtual Servers are distributed automatically.
  • Reduce your energy consumption and be more “Green”
  • Reduce administration costs using simple to manage interfaces to control your new environment that will scale with your needs.

Further Reading:
HP C Class Blades
VM Ware ESX
NetApp FAS Storage Appliance

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