Customers across all industries and segments are looking for ways to reduce cost and risk while increasing quality and agility in their IT infrastructure. Frequently these benefits can be realized in-part through server consolidation of infrastructure, application, and branch office server workloads, to re-host legacy applications, and to help provision software test and development environments, in addition to contributing to disaster and recovery plans.
Award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner The Henson Group, Inc., (THG) understands that virtualization is a key enabling technology to achieving business benefits through these means. Improvements in software technology and in hardware architecture and I/O have enabled virtual machine technology to operate effectively on lower cost server systems.
The Henson Group offers solutions based on Virtual Server hosted on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system to deliver the performance necessary to carry out consolidation, migration and isolation tasks through virtualization technology in an enterprise-ready computing environment with advanced levels of scalability, manageability and reliability.
Microsoft Virtual Server is the most cost-effective virtual machine solution designed for Windows Server to improve operational efficiency in software test and development, legacy line of business application migration, and server consolidation scenarios.
WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU: VIRTUALIZATION
By providing Microsoft Certified Consultants that specialize in this technology, The Henson Group can enable your company to realize the following benefits:
Virtual Server Maximizes Business Value
Virtual Server is a cost-effective and well supported server virtualization technology for the Windows Server System platform. As a key part of any server consolidation strategy, Virtual Server increases hardware utilization and enables organizations to rapidly configure and deploy new servers with the following key benefits:
• Efficient use of hardware resources: Virtual Server is production quality. Virtual machine isolation and resource management enable multiple workloads—including production workloads—to coexist on fewer servers, allowing organizations to make more efficient use of their hardware resources. Virtual Server works with Windows Server to provide broad interoperability with existing storage, network and security infrastructures.
• Enhanced administrative productivity and responsiveness: Virtual Server enables IT organizations to enhance their administrative productivity and rapidly deploy new servers to address changing business needs. Features such as the comprehensive COM API in Virtual Server and network booting (PXE booting) for virtual machines enable automated deployment and configuration of connected virtual machines that are easily administered with standard server management tools.
• Best-supported server virtualization solution: Virtual Server is extensively tested and supported by Microsoft in conjunction with its server operating systems and applications. Hence Virtual Server R2 is a well-supported virtualization solution both within Microsoft and across the broader ISV community.
Four key scenarios for organizations and server administrators point to the ways in which The Henson Group’s Virtual Server solutions leverages these advantages and delivers maximally on improving hardware efficiency and increasing administrator productivity.
Consolidate infrastructure, application, and branch office server workloads
Virtual Server is ideal for server consolidation in both the datacenter and the branch office, allowing organizations to make more efficient use of their hardware resources.
It also allows IT organizations to enhance their administrative productivity and rapidly deploy new servers to address changing business needs. Server consolidation reduces the amount of server hardware under management for an optimized IT infrastructure. Microsoft recommends consolidation by workload.
Virtual Server is the recommended approach for server consolidation of infrastructure services and department or branch office services—especially for server-based applications on industry-standard hardware. Virtual Server accomplishes this by allowing multiple applications and services on disparate operating systems to coexist on the same hardware, thus increasing hardware utilization and manageability while reducing capital and recurring costs related to hardware and hosting.
Ultimately, fewer physical systems are required, which reduces the enterprise hardware footprint. Microsoft Virtual Server offers a highly compelling price/performance virtual machine solution for increased application compatibility, manageability and resource utilization on the Windows Server platform.
Consolidate and re-host legacy applications
Virtual Server enables re-hosting of legacy operating systems and their associated custom applications from older hardware to new hardware running Windows Server.
As IT infrastructure enables increasingly powerful and reliable solutions, an ongoing challenge for many businesses is the management and maintenance of existing legacy server-based applications. Business applications often outlive their original operating system or hardware, and as support for these primary infrastructural elements diminishes over time, cost of ownership steadily increases. Under ideal conditions, customers would prefer to continue running business applications unchanged, but three factors increase the urgency of legacy application migration:
• Extensive resource demands required to administer and maintain server hardware for individual legacy applications;
• High cost and risk to upgrade or rewrite legacy applications for increased quality and agility; and,
• Diminishing hardware support for legacy operating systems.
Customers need a solution to enable legacy or orphaned applications, such as those written for Windows Server, to run on new hardware and software platforms. Many organizations find, for example, that the ISV who installed their application years ago may not be in business. Customers have called for a solution that assures smooth application migration while delivering solid application compatibility.
Virtual Server 2005 delivers the best of both worlds: application compatibility with legacy environments, while taking advantage of the reliability, manageability and security features of Windows Server.
Virtual Server delivers this capability by enabling customers to run legacy applications in their native software environment in virtual machines, without rewriting application logic, reconfiguring networks or retraining end users.
Automate and consolidate software test and development environments
Virtual Server enables businesses to consolidate their test and development server farm and automate the provisioning of virtual machines.
Customers across all segments are looking for ways to decrease costs and accelerate application and infrastructure installations and upgrades, while delivering a comprehensive level of quality assurance. In order to achieve testing coverage goals prior to going into production, multiple challenges must be overcome:
• Network operations: Incorrect configuration of a test network could endanger production networks.
• Developer productivity: Developer productivity is wasted on time-consuming administrative tasks.
• Server operational and capital costs: High-quality application test coverage requires replicating production computing environments, which requires costly hardware and human resources posing risk to budgets and schedules.
Disaster and recovery
The Henson Group recommends using Virtual Server as part of a disaster and recovery plan that requires application portability and flexibility across hardware platforms. Consolidating physical servers onto fewer physical machines running virtual machines decreases the number of physical assets that can be damaged or compromised in a disaster.
In the event of recovery, virtual machines can be hosted anywhere, on host machines other than those affected by a disaster, speeding up recovery times and maximizing organization flexibility.