October Webinar Report
Server virtualization allows organizations to gain advantages in high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR)
 
Neil Tantingco, IBM Alliance Manager at VMware, and David Jiang, Systems Engineer at VMware, presented an online demo in Key's October Webinar. VMware provides software products that allows you to simplify IT so companies leverage their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster. The VMware virtual infrastructure approach to IT management creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, enabling administrators to allocate these virtual resources quickly to the business units that need them most.

This results in:

  • 60-80 percent utilization rates for x86 servers, up from today's 5-15 percent
  • New applications provisioned in tens of seconds, not days
  • Change request response times measured in minutes
  • Zero-downtime hardware maintenance without waiting for maintenance windows

The Webinar was designed for:

  • CIOs, IT Directors and Managers
  • Operations Managers
  • Managers of Wintel, xSeries and Blade environments

The Webinar presented a discussion on how to eliminate planned and unplanned Windows server downtime using VMware for server virtualization. VMware eliminates dedicated physical servers for each operating system / configuration / application environment.

Viewers learned how to:

  • Affordably enable business continuity for mission-critical applications
  • Dynamically move workloads across distributed physical servers without service interruption
  • Reduce hardware redundancy
  • Streamline server provisioning and management
  • Easily monitor system availability and performance

Attendees gained insight into how organizations are  managing their server resources better with VMware, and viewed an online demonstration of a three-server configuration using VMware.
 
Tantingco began by discussing the meaning of business continuity. It is defined as the uninterrupted availability of business systems and applications, ensuring the continuance of a business operation after a service interruption. In other words, the elimination of all downtime.
 
There are three types of downtime: unplanned downtime (Oops, it looks like we just went down!), planned downtime (Attention: we will be down tomorrow from 1:00 – 2:00 am for hardware maintenance.) and disasters (That just felt like a 5.0 earthquake!).
 
According to IDC, IT spending to support business continuity has been explosive, and the cost of downtime per hour now runs into the millions of dollars per hour for many industries that require their critical applications to be up and running continuously. Also, The META Group reports that spending on business continuity has skyrocketed from $9.1 billion in 2000 to almost $72 billion in 2005. Moreover, a 2005 Gartner Group report found that large enterprise groups are estimating their infrastructure downtime cost at only one-third of the actual cost.
 
Clearly, downtime has risen to the highest level of concern faced by IT today.
 
VMware permits building multiple virtual machines that can operate simultaneously on a single x86 platform (Intel or AMD). 

This permits the incorporation of several important features:

  • Isolation – Fault and security problems are isolated at the hardware level.
  • Encapsulation – Allows rapid restart by copying complete virtual machine to a DR site.
  • Hardware Independence – Eliminates the need for duplicate hardware at DR sites.
  • Leverage Redundancy – Allows the HA features of the host to be available on all virtual machines.

One benefit of these features and others in VMware is the elimination of planned downtime during maintenance operations.  Another benefit is a simple way to gain HA with the automatic restart of the virtual machines following a physical server failure.
 
VMware makes three different options available to support secure forms of DR, all of which greatly simplify the recovery steps in the DR operation.
 
Tantingco walked through several interesting scenarios, including the Physical-to-Virtual DR Process and the Virtual-to-Virtual DR Process – showing some of the advantages of the latter approach.
 
An extensive Q & A period extended the Webinar 10 minutes past the scheduled close, demonstrating strong interest in what the speakers were presenting. To see these questions and the replies provided, please review the archived Webinar on Key's Web site.
 
Tantingco concluded the Webinar by saying attendees can schedule a private demo of VMware tailored to their needs by contacting Pete Elliot at Key. 
 
You can view the complete recording of this Key Webinar by clicking here.
 
During the Webinar, Elliot announced: Key is offering at no charge to the first 10 companies that contact him who are interested in VMware ... a free C-DAT study of an environment of 100 or more servers, or an ROI-TCO analysis of an environment of under 100 servers.  See Key Offers below for details.