Virtualisation

Server virtualisation, also known as hardware virtualisation, is a popular solutions because of the potential for serious economic benefits. Server virtualisation enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine as virtual machines (VMs). With server virtualisation, you can consolidate workloads across multiple under-utilised server machines onto a smaller number of machines. Fewer physical machines reduce costs through lower hardware, electricity, cooling costs, less rack space and management overhead.

Who needs Virtualisation?

Virtualisation is ideally suited to companies that have the following characteristics:

• More than 5 physical servers
• A need for a disaster recovery solution that will have your applications running in less than 1 hour after a server failure
• Not enough rack space to house all the servers you have
• A dynamic environment where new servers need to be deployed often or quickly

Benefits of Virtualisation

Virtualisation provides a dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualisation platform combined with a single set of integrated management tools to manage both physical and virtual resources, enabling you to create an agile and dynamic data centre.  Virtualisation enables:

Server consolidation

Businesses are under pressure to ease management and reduce costs while retaining and enhancing competitive advantages, such as flexibility, reliability, scalability, and security. The fundamental use of virtualisation to help consolidate many servers on a single system while maintaining isolation helps address these demands. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), not just from lowering hardware requirements but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.

Business continuity and disaster recovery

Business continuity is the ability to minimise both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. That includes time lost to routine functions, such as maintenance and backup, as well as unanticipated outages. Virtualisation includes powerful business continuity features, such as live backup and quick migration, enabling businesses to meet stringent uptime and response metrics.

Disaster recovery is a key component of business continuity. Natural disasters, malicious attacks, and even simple configuration problems like software conflicts can cripple services and applications until administrators resolve the problems and restore any backed up data.  Virtualisation now provides support for disaster recovery (DR) within IT environments and across data centres. Rapid and reliable disaster and business recovery helps ensure minimal data loss and powerful remote management capabilities.

Testing and development

Testing and development are frequently the first business functions to take advantage of virtualisation technology. Using virtual machines, development staffs can create and test a wide variety of scenarios in a safe, self-contained environment that accurately approximates the operation of physical servers and clients. Virtualisation maximises utilisation of test hardware that can help reduce costs, improve life cycle management, and improve test coverage. With extensive guest OS support and checkpoint features, Virtualisation provides a great platform for your test and development environments.

Why is Generation-e the right company to call?

Generation-e empowers businesses to seamlessly deploy applications on integrated networks to increase productivity and gain competitive advantages.

Generation-e delivers virtualisation solutions to support your business making your remote workers more productive.  Working with the industry’s leading solutions from Microsoft and VMware, we architect the right solution based on your business needs and application environment and our holistic solution delivers more than just virtualisation.

We implement a systems approach to optimising your network:

• Identify applications running in your network
• Define business priorities for application performance
• Optimise your servers storage, network and applications
• Control and protect applications to meet defined business objectives
• Gain end-to-end visibility

The best way to start a virtualisation project is to assess you current server and application performance and needs.  Generation-e provides a capacity planning service that will identify what servers are good targets for virtualisation and why.