Server Consolidation & Containment

Virtualisation has become the recognised production grade solution for increasing the utilisation of existing hardware.

Experience over the past seven years has indicated that processor utilisations may be increased from 10-15% up to 80% in a typical workload environment. This leads to substantial reductions in hardware required.

By consolidating your server hardware with virtualisation you can improve utilisation of existing hardware from 5-15% up to 80% and reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better. Typical consolidation ratios range from 7:1 to 15:1 with production applications, and virtualisation can accelerate provisioning time by 50-70%

You can manage virtual machines from a central location and monitor the performance of virtual machines and their hosts. Fewer servers means less money spent on energy consumption due to reduced power and cooling requirements.

The ViFX team can help you assess your IT environment to identify consolidation candidates and to calculate the potential savings from using virtualisation.

Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often costly and complex—and can’t meet your recovery objectives even after doubling hardware (and cost) for protected applications.

Testing them can be a nightmare because the steps are tedious and the documentation is hard to keep up to date. Likewise, keeping two sets of hardware in sync is nearly impossible. VMware vSphere lets you recover to any machine, not just specific duplicate hardware, reducing hardware costs and maintenance budget and lowering the complexity of maintaining a backup site. Even if you haven’t virtualised all production servers, virtualise target servers for your data recovery to allow greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings.

• Recover from disasters rapidly
• Ensure reliable disaster recovery
• Reduce the cost of disaster recovery
• Automate disaster recovery

Virtualisation products let you eliminate planned downtime, ensure data protection, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

Benefits of Virtualising your datacentre

Effective Data protection, including non-disruptive automated backup and restore processes, with high availability through reduced planned and unplanned downtime and disaster recovery with hardware independent recovery.

Simplify backup and recovery of your data and systems with virtualisation. Easily recover important data within your recovery time objectives using your existing backup tools and methodologies. Benefit from a simpler data protection plan, encompassing all systems and applications and leveraging the benefits of a virtualised datacentre.

Eliminate Planned and Unplanned Downtime

Make sure your applications have the highest level of availability with built-in service-levels that are easier and more cost effective than traditional solutions. The live migration of virtual machines eliminates the need for planned downtime, allowing IT to perform maintenance on physical servers anytime, without user or service disruption. Take advantage of VMware vSphere’s Fault Tolerance feature, protecting against physical failures, including network card failures, storage path failures, and other hardware failures.

Build Reliable and Efficient Disaster Recovery Plans

Eliminate the cost and unpredictability of traditional disaster recovery solutions by taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of a 100% virtualised datacentre. Utilise this foundation to build highly effective disaster recovery plans and test your plan in a non-disruptive manner—eliminating the issue of failure due to hardware differences between the primary and backup datacentres.

High Availability

Traditional high-availability solutions are costly, hard to implement and difficult to manage. With VMware vSphere you can increase the baseline level of availability for all your applications and ensure service level agreements are met.

• Eliminate planned downtime for common maintenance operations
• Provide higher availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications
• Recover rapidly from server failures with automatic restart of systems

Slash Planned Downtime

Planned downtime, including hardware maintenance, server migration, and firmware updates, typically accounts for over 80% of datacentre downtime. VMware vSphere lets you move workloads dynamically to different physical servers so server maintenance can be performed without downtime or service interruption. Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services and eliminate the need for planned downtime for common maintenance operations.

Prevent Unplanned Downtime

VMware vSphere builds important fault tolerance capabilities into your datacentre infrastructure transparent to operating systems and applications running in virtual machines. You can easily configure these features to be used by all the virtual machines on a physical system, reducing the cost and complexity of providing higher availability.

Built-in fault tolerance capabilities include:

• Network interface teaming provides tolerance of individual network card failures
• Storage multi-pathing tolerates storage path failures
• VMware Fault Tolerance features zero downtime, zero data loss continuous availability in the face of server hardware failures for any application running in a virtual machine
• Ensure rapid recovery from outages

Because VMware virtual machines are hardware-independent and can share physical resources, failover can be deployed without requiring dedicated, identical standby hardware and the added complexity of maintaining identical configurations. For server failures, VMware High Availability (HA) ensures rapid, automated restart of virtual machines. VMware HA automatically and intelligently restarts affected virtual machines on production servers.

Leverage third-party clustering software inside VMware virtual environments by clustering virtual machines with other virtual machines or clustering physical machines with other physical machines. VMware vSphere lets you implement clustering without requiring the cost of identical servers, without the complexity of rebuilding clustering when physical hardware changes, and without the difficulty associated with testing clustering of physical systems.

Desktop Virtualisation

Advances in virtualisation technology enable IT Departments to host individual desktops inside virtual machines running in the data centre.

Users access these desktops remotely from a PC or a thin client using a remote display protocol. Since applications are managed centrally at the corporate data centre, organisations gain better control over their desktops. Installations, upgrades, patches and backups can be done with more confidence without user intervention.

No Limit

Unlike traditional server-based solutions that are limited in their ability to provide a complete desktop experience or are limited to specific architectures, virtual desktop infrastructure includes full PC environments that are familiar to end users and not limited by hardware or location. As complete desktop environments are encapsulated inside virtual machines and maintained in the corporate data centre, they can be instantly recovered and redeployed.

If one user’s desktop crashes, it will not affect another user’s desktop or application because it’s running in a separate virtual machine. Differing versions of applications can be delivered to different users depending upon company or business imperatives, not restricted by technology.

Offsite and Remote Solutions

Organisations with branch offices, remote workers, or offsite facilities can manage and standardise their desktop environments and applications in the corporate data centre, where backups, upgrades, and complete maintenance can be performed from one central location. Virtual desktop technology is ideal for offsite facilities used for development, call centres, back order processing, or other transaction-based tasks where confidential information and intellectual property can be securely stored and maintained in the corporate data centre.

The desktop of the future is not a single PC

It's a combination of different devices, multiple platforms, legacy and web-based applications, as well as the end user's data and settings. Give your end users a personalised view of their desktop, applications and data while maintaining centralised control and security. Separate the desktop from the underlying hardware and the applications from the operating system to simplify and reduce the costs of desktop management. Provide a Universal Client Solution with VMware View – where desktops follow the user regardless of device or location.

Improve Management & Control with Virtual Desktops

Gain key advantages over traditional client-server and server-based models. Configure, deploy and maintain hardware-independent desktop virtual machines from central locations for simpler management and more efficient desktop provisioning. Enable stronger policy enforcement and tighter data security by encapsulating the desktop operating system, applications, and user data as a set of files in a virtual machine that can be stored centrally.

Most importantly, for end users, VMware desktop virtualisation solutions deliver a familiar desktop experience that does not require application sharing, software modifications or user training.

Remote & Branch Office Solution

Reduce the long-term cost of supporting transactional and fixed-function workers on corporate-owned or third-party PCs and thin clients in branch offices, call centres and other locations while maintaining complete control over corporate information assets.

Secure Mobile Computing

Provide telecommuters, salespeople in the field and other end users outside the corporate firewall with anytime, anywhere access to their own complete, unmodified desktop environment while minimising the risk of a data security breach involving sensitive information.

Unmanaged Desktops

Extend secure temporary access to corporate information assets for consultants, contractors, customers and other third-party stakeholders to improve collaboration and reduce business latency while minimising the risk of data leakage and malicious code intrusion.

OS Migration

Improve datacentre efficiency and security during OS migrations, reduce the cost and complexity of migration, and provide a better user experience.

Application Migration & Updates

Maximise application uptime during migrations and updates using agentless application virtualisation to isolate applications from each other and the OS, thus eliminating interoperability issues.

Software License Compliance

Keep license proliferation in check using standard discovery and audit tools to manage and track the distribution of applications over both physical and virtual systems.

Regulatory Compliance

Accurately track and monitor who’s using what applications and when with existing tools, controls and procedures.

Deliver rich, personalised virtual desktops to any device with all the benefits of centralised enterprise desktop management.

The VMware View portfolio of products lets IT run virtual desktops in the datacentre while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalised environment on any device at any location. Get greater flexibility, reliability, efficiency and security managing desktops and applications from the datacentre.

• Lower costs by centralising management, administration and resources
• Increase security by moving data from desktop devices into the datacentre
• Improve business agility with faster provisioning and user flexibility with universal access

Desktop Virtualisation - a summary of the advantages and benefits to your business

Simplified Desktop Management

Deliver desktops to the user and not to a physical device by eliminating the bonds between a desktop image and the physical PC

Deliver, manage and update all of your Windows desktops and applications from a central location

Automated Virtual Desktop Provisioning

Use a single management tool to provision new desktops or groups of desktops

Get an intuitive easy-to-use administrative interface for setting desktop policies

Use a template to provision pools of desktops

Set administrative policies, such as how many virtual machines can be in a pool, or logoff parameters

Advanced Virtual Desktop Image Management

Rapidly create virtual desktops from a master image

Push updates and patches out to any number of virtual desktops in minutes without affecting user settings, data or preferences

Unified Access

Securely access your personalised desktop in a Windows Terminal Server environment or on a Blade PC from a single interface

Remotely access physical PCs

Monitor and audit desktop activity as well as load balance multiple Windows Terminal Servers

Virtual Printing

Print from virtual desktops to local devices without compatibility issues, bandwidth restraints or complicated user setup

Automatically discover, connect and print from a virtual desktop to any local or networked printer that’s defined on the client device

Use universal print drivers to eliminate compatibility issues

Compression delivers high-quality printing with enhanced performance, even over suboptimal network connections

Familiar End-User Experience

Deliver complete, unmodified desktop environment compatible with existing legacy or custom applications

Get improved end-user experience for playing rich multimedia

Print to local printers, USB devices or other peripherals

Let users access their desktops from a wide variety of virtual desktop devices, anytime

Security

Get strong network security to protect sensitive corporate data

Use SSL tunnelling to ensure all connections are completely encrypted

Get full support of RSA SecurID® and the added security of two-factor authentication for tightened access control

Availability and Scalability

Deliver high availability with no single point of failure

Get automatic failover and pervasive, cost-effective protection within your virtualised desktop environment, without the cost or complexity of traditional clustering solutions, with VMware High Availability (HA)

Utilise advanced clustering capabilities on the physical and virtual layers provide enterprise-class scalability

Streamlined Application Management

Separate applications from underlying operating systems for increased compatibility and streamlined application management with VMware ThinApp

Run applications on servers in the datacentre and make them accessible through a shortcut on the virtual desktop further, reducing the size of the desktop image and subsequent storage needs

Run multiple applications or multiple versions of the same applications on users’ virtual desktops without conflict

Ensure all desktops are up to date with the latest application version

Offline Desktop

Run managed virtual desktops locally or in the datacentre through the same administration framework with Offline Desktop, an experimental feature in VMware View 3

Apply and enforce all existing security policies for that virtual desktop

Check the desktop back into the datacentre for resynchronisation as needed

Thin Client Support

Get support for a wide variety of thin client devices.

Application Virtualisation

Simplify application deployments by eliminating application conflicts through application virtualisation. Package an entire application and its settings into a single executable that is isolated from the OS. Plug VMware ThinApp into your existing management infrastructure and accelerate your application development and desktop deployment. Deliver and deploy applications more efficiently, more securely, and more cost-effectively.

• Run applications from any media without needing admin privileges for secure mobile computing
• Maximise uptime during application migration and updates
• Eliminate Installation Conflicts with Application Virtualisation

Application Virtualisation encapsulates the applications from the OS and each other; eliminating costly regression testing and conflicts from badly behaving applications. Just plug in an .MSI or .EXE file to deploy a virtual system environment, including registry keys, DLLs, third-party libraries, and frameworks without requiring any installation of agents or applications on the underlying operating system.

Package Once, Deploy Everywhere—Network, USB, Physical or Virtual Desktops

Deploy virtualised applications in user mode, without administrative rights. No device drivers are installed and no registry changes are made because the entire application and its virtual OS are delivered as a single EXE file. Transparently stream large applications from a shared network drive with no server or client software to install. Upgrade or roll-back applications while they’re running. The new version will execute the next time the user starts the application.

Cater to Your Mobile Workforce

Let your users run applications on virtually any computer they have access to, including kiosk and hotel PCs. They won’t need to install software or device drivers and won’t need admin rights. Applications run directly from portable storage devices, including Flash drives.

Improve Your Software Distribution Process

Deliver software that protects the local OS from modifications that might cause instability or breach security using your existing configuration management tools. Even restricted user accounts can safely run virtualised applications without requiring a local installation, making it much more appetising for IT staff concerned about security.

Ease OS and Application Migrations

ThinApp agentless application virtualisation eases OS migrations by enabling applications to run side by side on the same operating system. Users can continue with business as usual without disruption from problematic applications. Furthermore, if an application needs to be removed from the endpoint—it is a simple file-remove with no mess left to clean up in the system registry.