our virtualization services
activIT systems provides a wide range of virtualization services, and we are recognized VMware partners.
Our virtualization goal is to reduce downtime, increase business continuity, enhance disaster recovery preparations, and save our clients money.
- Initial consultations to determine if virtualization will benefit your organisation
- Total Cost of Ownership calculation of standard vs virtualized environments
- Identification of physical workloads that are good virtualization candidates
- Sales of VMware licenses; Virtual Infrastructure 3, vSphere, vCenter 3, ESX and ESXi Server, and more
- Implementation of VMware products
- Virtual machine creation, and physical-to-virtual conversions
- Virtual machine support, maintenance, and troubleshooting
We use virtualization ourselves, in a production environment - in fact, this web server is virtualized, our web development server is a VM, and we run Microsoft Terminal Services in a virtual environment as well.
In our instance the return on investment was immediate: we saved $10,000 in server hardware from the very beginning, while we continue to count the savings in power usage and the environment.
:: contact us about virtualization
a virtualization primer
Image courtesy of VMware
For the uninitiated, virtualization can be a confusing topic. What isn't confusing, is if you have more than two or three physical servers currently in use, virtualization will save your business money and resources. It will ultimately reduce your total cost of ownership of those servers and reduce hardware expenditure in the future.
While servers have become more powerful over time, many applications, like databases, are often incompatible with other applications. This has led to the segregation of applications onto separate individual servers to reduce incompatibilities.
This approach leads to other problems, which grow exponentially with every new server put into production. Servers need to be purchased or leased, then configured, tested, have power and cooling supplied to them, and need to be maintained. They also take up a lot of space. Servers are very often underutilized, with on average only 10% of their total processing capacity used at any one time.
Virtualization allows multiple operating systems, like Windows or Linux, to run side-by-side on the same server hardware, without interference from other operating systems on the same hardware. Each operating system, called a virtual machine, is entirely isolated from each other virtual machine, but resides on the same hardware. This approach allows many workloads and applications to run on fewer servers, saving money, physical space, power and cooling costs, and commissioning time.
VMware have a more detailed explanation available online. Wikipedia also have a detailed article as well.
