VMware Overview

 

If you require a Virtualised hosting platform, chances are you are familiar with how its works as well as the benefits of using such a hosted platform. Server Centre have extensive experience in the Virtualisation of servers and have been delivering Virtualised hosting platforms to their customers now for over 6 years.

Our team of Virtualisation specialists are on hand to discuss your needs and explain the benefits that Virtualisation can offer your company and IT infrastructure in order to deliver the correct service and licenses to best suit your needs.

Our virtualisation solutions are designed primarily with VMware ESX, however Xenserver and Microsoft's Hyper-V are also options available to you. Both platforms deliver automatic failover, Advanced monitoring and resource management.

New to Virtualisation?

• Virtualisation allows a physical server to be sliced into multiple virtual servers; each assigned a subset of the physical resources of ram, cpu and hard disk.
• Each virtual machine runs its own operating system and functions just like a real server.
• The virtualisation layer works just on top of the actual hardware allowing the physical resources to be shared among multiple virtual machines without allowing any interference with each other.
  

Why Virtualise?

• Better utilisation of hardware
• Cost and management savings
  

Many providers claim to offer “the platform” for cloud computing. However, these propriety platforms require you to recode your applications locking you into their platform. If the platform does not meet your needs or you have performance or SLA issues changing vendors will be painful and time consuming if you have to re-write mission critical applications. Server Centre provide multi tenancy and private clouds. These “private clouds” enable your business to reduce costs by running software applications in virtual machines on fewer, highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers. Your business benefits by tapping into additional cloud-based resources, as needed. No code rewriting is necessary.

Case study example

Take a typical medium-sized non-IT business which has a small data centre room with 10 racks and 100 servers, aged between 1 and 4 years old. Assumptions:

• 3 year hardware refresh cycle
• No virtualisation
• 70 servers running single apps
• 20 servers in clusters running high-capacity tasks
• 10 storage servers
• Team of 3 systems administrators

The current costs to this business for their mini-data centre add up as follows (including associated overheads):

 

Item	Item Cost per year	Count	Total
Staffing	£35,000	3	£105,000
Server capital	£400	100	£40,000
Power & cooling	£430	100	£43,000
Space (/sq foot)	£35	1,000	£35,000
		Total	£223,000

When this typical client migrates to us (which can happen gradually in a piecemeal fashion) we would move them to the latest high-performance servers and storage solutions (meaning less boxes), and help them to take advantage of virtualisation (providing huge savings). We include the power, housing, capital and full management costs of the servers in the price:

 

Item	Item Cost per year	Count	Total
Virtual Private Servers	£600	70	£42,000
Dedicated servers	£3,600	10	£36,000
Storage servers	£6,000	3	£18,000
		Total	£96,000

 

In this example the customer would save a massive 57% (£127,000 per year) on their IT costs, and at the same time gain all the other benefits listed above.

Looking for help with implementation, support or consultancy?

 

Find out how much virtualisation could save your business by using the VMware Capacity Planner tool. Contact us today for our latest offer. Click Here