The Challenge
Today’s IT infrastructure too often suffers from siloed server and storage resources — leading to low utilization, gross inefficiency, and an inability to respond quickly and flexibly to changing business needs.
Courtesy of Cisco Systems, Inc. Unauthorized use not permitted.
The adoption of virtualized infrastructure, including servers, storage, and the underlying data and storage networks, to deliver IT as a service (ITaaS) in data centers of all types — promises to overcome these limitations and reduce overall operating costs.
The lack of confidence and experience that data and applications will be securely isolated has been a major impediment to adoption of fully virtualized data center systems:
- Enterprises need to isolate HR records, finance, customer credit card details, and other sensitive data.
- Organizations must make sure of separation of business unit applications and data.
- Outsourced development requires separate areas for each development activity.
- Healthcare organizations must make sure of patient record confidentiality.
- Universities need to partition examinations, enrollment details, and commercial research.
- Financial organizations need to isolate client details and partition trading, wholesale, and retail banking.
- Governments must partition records for taxation, welfare, healthcare, education, and ensure both the security and integrity of the data.
How can you be certain that applications, data, and customers are securely isolated as you migrate critical applications to an infrastructure in which servers, networks, and storage are all shared resources?
Courtesy of Cisco Systems, Inc. Unauthorized use
Together, these technologies offer advanced benefits that greatly simplify the deployment and management of IT infrastructure and applications with:
- Unmatched end-to-end security and isolation in data center virtualized environments.
- Simplified, unified server, storage, network, and virtualization architecture.
- Lower system and ongoing operations cost.
- Greater business agility for applications.
- Less risk in deployment, upgrades, and business continuity.
Three Industry Leaders: One Purpose Built Architecture
The traditional approach to guaranteeing application isolation required dedicated, isolated hardware. A virtualized data center infrastructure demands strict isolation between different clients, business units, departments, and security zones — as well as the ability to separate production operations from test and development. Secure multi-tenancy enables you to partition a shared infrastructure in whatever way makes sense for your business. Data and data access are securely isolated, and sufficient workload performance is maintained.
To create our purpose built architecture, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware took a top to bottom approach that allows data storage, network fabric, and virtual servers to be efficiently shared. In a multi-tenant environment, VMs or groups of VMs are securely isolated from other VMs or groups of VMs using VMware vShield zone technology in conjunction with the Cisco Nexus 1000V. Once securely isolated, VMs are connected to NetApp storage systems through a network that is segmented and secured using the Cisco Nexus family of switches. The NetApp storage vFiler™ units to which they connect are also securely isolated from other vFiler units using NetApp® MultiStore® technology, which results in a secure isolated storage system.
This purpose built architecture have been carefully tested, characterized and documented via a Cisco Validated Design that includes design and deployment guides. This process was validated so that customers can have peace of mind knowing that this solution can be implemented with the least amount of risk to their business.
VMware vSphere server virtualization solutions
VMware vSphere is the most trusted and reliable server virtualization platform in the industry. It offers the highest levels of responsiveness and availability, which are required by the most demanding data centers in the world.
VMware vSphere will help you to cut capital and operating costs and give you more control over your IT infrastructure. You will be able to free up your IT staff and can use any hardware, operating system, and applications you like.
VMware server virtualization technology can help you to make the most of your IT assets. It can help to reduce the capital expenditure of the data center by as much as 60%! Reductions in real estate, cooling, and power requirements can help you to cut energy costs by as much as 80%!
What’s new with VMware vSphere 4.1
Efficiency through Utilization and Automation
vSphere 4.1 has better memory management technology, expanded resource pooling capabilities with more granular storage and network I/O controls, and major enhancements to overall scalability.
VMware vCompute
- Memory Compression—Reclaim application performance by up to 30 percent by reducing memory contention as a bottleneck
- DRS Host Affinity—Set granular policies for virtual machine movement (for example, restricting a virtual machine to a specific host due to licensing impact)
VMware vStorage
- Storage I/O Control—Set storage quality-of-service priorities for each virtual machine to guarantee access to storage resources
- Performance Reporting—Deliver key storage performance statistics regardless of storage protocol
- Array Integration—Leverage new protocol interfaces between VMware and storage arrays for faster performance for vSphere operations such as Storage vMotion events and virtual machine provisioning.
VMware vNetwork
- Network I/O Control—Set network quality-of-service priorities per flow type for guaranteed access to network resources.
Scalability
- “Cloud Scale”*—Fully virtualize the datacenter and scale at least twice as large than ever before
- Virtual machines per cluster: 3,000 (more than a 200 percent increase)
- Hosts per vCenter Server instance: 1,000 (more than a 300 percent increase)
- Virtual machines per vCenter Server instance: 10,000 powered on (more than a 300 percent increase), 15,000 registered
*All scale numbers above show the new 4.1 metric, as well as the increase from the vSphere 4.0 release (4.0 numbers are above in the same pillar).
Agility with Control
Availability
- VMware vMotion™—Speed and scale enhancements to vMotion deliver superior platform response and availability by migrating virtual machines up to five times faster and enabling up to eight vMotion events in parallel.
- VMware High Availability—Deeper diagnostic and health check capabilities further enhances application availability in virtual machines.
Security
- Active Directory integration—Seamless user authentication at the vSphere host (rather than at the vCenter Server level) for centralized user management. Easily assign privileges to users or groups plus roll out permission rules across hosts.
Scale
- Create private and public clouds twice as large as before with the ability to run more than twice as many virtual machines in a cluster, manage more than three times as many hosts, and manage more than three times as many powered-on virtual machines from a single vCenter Server console.
VMware vSphere for small business
These cost-effective server consolidation and virtualization packages are specially designed for small IT environments.
- VMware vSphere Essentials is a complete solution that is designed to help small offices to manage and consolidate several application workloads. It requires a small initial investment and helps to reduce hardware and operating costs.
- VMware vSphere Essentials Plus adds on data protection and high application availability. It is a complete business continuity and server consolidation solution.
VMware vSphere for mid-sized and enterprise business
You can use the power of a virtualization platform to build a private cloud, increase control through service-level automation, and pool resources to deliver IT as a Service (ITaaS).
- VMware vSphere Standard is an entry-level solution for basic consolidation of applications. It helps to reduce hardware costs and accelerates application deployment.
- VMware vSphere Advanced is a strategic consolidation solution for protecting business-critical applications against planned and unplanned downtime. It helps to provide superior application availability.
- VMware vSphere Enterprise is designed to protect data, minimize downtime, and automate resource management.
- VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus offers the full range of VMware vSphere features. It helps to transform data centers into simplified environments, which offer reliable and flexible IT services.
Getting Started
The first step to maximizing data center performance is an objective evaluation of your current infrastructure capabilities. Adcap Network Systems has partnered with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware to provide you with a specialized set of consulting services to help you make data-driven decisions and to get to your desired results. Contact us to get this consulting started!
“I’m Steve Norton, Adcap’s lead Solutions Architect for Data Center Virtualization. I enjoy creating designs that are going to work well based on my many years of experience with applications, servers, virtualization, storage arrays, data networks, and SAN’s.”
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Last Updated: January 16th, 2012 |
