What is Virtual Infrastructure

We coined a term for virtualising the IT infrastructure–we call it the Virtual Infrastructure. A Virtual Infrastructure lets you share your physical resources of multiple machines across your entire infrastructure.

A virtual machine lets you share the resources of a single physical computer across multiple virtual machines for maximum efficiency where resources are shared across multiple virtual machines and applications. Your business needs are the driving force behind dynamically mapping the physical resources of your infrastructure to applications—even as those needs evolve and change. Aggregate your x86 servers along with network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources that can be utilised by the applications when and where they’re needed.

This resource optimisation drives greater flexibility in the organisation and results in lower capital and operational costs.

What does Virtual Infrastructure consist of?

• Bare-metal hypervisors to enable full virtualisation of each x86 computer
• Virtual infrastructure services such as resource management and consolidated backup to optimise available resources among virtual machines
• Automation solutions that provide special capabilities to optimise a particular IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery

Decouple your software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure so you can aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources. Then dynamically deliver those resources, securely and reliably, to applications as needed. This pioneering approach lets our customers use building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers to build a self-optimising datacentre and deliver high levels of utilisation, availability, automation and flexibility.

What are the advantages of a Virtual Infrastructure?

Gain the benefits of virtualisation in production-scale IT environments by building your virtual infrastructure with the leading virtualisation platform from VMware. VMware Infrastructure 3 unifies discrete hardware resources to create a shared dynamic platform, while delivering built–in availability, security and scalability to applications. It supports a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure. We have designed our solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system so you have a broad platform choice. Our solutions provide a key integration point for hardware and infrastructure management vendors and partners to deliver differentiated value that can be applied uniformly across all application and operating system environments.

Reduce costs with a Virtual Infrastructure

Lower your capital and operational costs and improve operational efficiency and flexibility. Go beyond server consolidation and deploy a standard virtualisation platform to automate your entire IT infrastructure. VMware customers have harnessed the power of virtualisation to better manage IT capacity, provide better service levels, and streamline IT processes.

Get more from your existing hardware

Our customers report dramatic results when they adopt our virtual infrastructure solutions, including:

• 60-80% utilisation rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualised PCs)
• Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualised
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime