Virtualisation

WHAT IS VIRTUALISATION?

Today’s computer hardware was designed to run one single operating system and one single application on one single machine. This was found to be significantly under-utilising most of the hardware deployed by most IT departments. Virtualisation allows you to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, thus allowing each virtual machine to share the resources of that single machine. This means that individual virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on one physical ‘host’ or piece of hardware.

This being the case, Virtualisation allows businesses to maximise the performance of their IT hardware resources, and in so doing make IT more flexible and cost-effective. Virtualisation has now moved beyond mainframes and servers and has found its way into applications, networks and storage and the importantly, the desktop environment.

SERVER VIRTUALISATION
Server Virtualisation is often seen as the first rung on the Virtualisation ladder for most organisations. The technology has proven to offer significant benefits to both the IT department and the business as a whole as it offers both operational and financial rewards when deployed correctly.

WHY VIRTUALISE YOUR SERVERS?
Customers who have adopted virtualisation technology and deployed solutions through CMS have reported the following significant improvements;

SLASH I.T. COSTS
Server consolidation is often seen as the key driver for server virtualisation as it offers substantial cost savings by reducing the amount of servers required. This however, is by no means the only way of driving down costs. Virtualisation management tools can reduce operational costs by making improvements to response times which allows IT administrators to spend less time on repetitive configuration, monitoring and maintenance tasks. Moreover, increased manageability means decreasing resource requirements. In other words, you will need less personnel to deliver better performance. In addition, the consolidation of servers in a datacentre will undoubtedly result in lower power consumption and less cooling requirements, therefore reducing utility costs significantly.

IMPROVED AGILITY
With virtualisation, servers become easier and quicker to provision and the applications can be deployed more rapidly. In addition, the volume of servers decreases and the virtualisation management tools shrink the amount of time required to administer the new environment thus demonstrating the new agility of the IT department.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
Virtualisation enables the data centre to significantly increase resource utilisation by pooling common infrastructure resources. This means the performance of the hardware is greatly increased. Down- time is reduced and migrations are made simpler as the virtual environments mean that there is no interruption in service. Recovery from an un-planned incident becomes straightforward rather than a reason to panic. Overall the performance of the IT department as a whole is much improved as they start to deliver more with less.

INCREASED AVAILABILITY
Virtualisation eliminates the need for planned down-time, the most common causes of which are hardware maintenance, application migration and backups. Equally important is the need to be better equipped for a failure or indeed a disaster outside of the control of the IT department. Delivering maximum uptime to the business is becoming a ‘must have’ rather than a ‘nice to have’ which makes server virtualisation a must for every IT department that delivers business critical applications. Virtualisation reduces the impact to user productivity and allows the IT team to deliver changes during the working day rather than at week-ends or through the night.

A GREENER IT DEPARTMENT
Virtualisation can deliver up to 80% savings on energy costs as the number of servers is reduced significantly. More importantly perhaps, is the ability to run the IT department more efficiently, correct under utilisation and reduce the carbon footprint of your organisation.

VIRTUAL DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE (VDI)
Virtualising the desktop infrastructure is the use of virtual machines to let multiple network subscribers maintain individualised desktops on a single, centrally located computer or server. The central machine may be in an office, home or a business or data centre. Users could be geographically spread but are will all be connected to the central machine by a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN) or even the Internet. Desktop virtualisation users can customise and modify their desktops to meet their specific needs. In this way, desktop virtualisation offers improved flexibility compared with the more traditional client/server solutions.

WHY VIRTUALISE YOUR DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE?

REDUCE COSTS
VDI technology helps to reduce IT costs for your organisation in a number of areas both from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective. Once VDI has been deployed, less resource is required to manage the desktop. Less travel time and cost is required to other sites to install and migrate users onto new software releases. There is no need to upgrade desktop hardware when rolling out new software therefore saving on the cost of additional memory or disk space. Down time becomes a thing of the past as new software images are deployed instantly which results in much better productivity.

IMPROVED MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY
Typically, the corporate desktop infrastructure is managed using remote software technology. This is both cumbersome and expensive to manage as the volume of users and the geographical locations make the logistics complicated. Using technology such as VDI allows you to have central management of all your desktops and comprehensively control what is being installed and used on the desktops. The deployment of a virtual desktop is incredibly swift when compared to using traditional imaging technology. With VDI technology, managing multiple sites and thousands of users becomes uncomplicated and comparatively effortless.

IMPROVED SECURITY
With VDI, you have much greater control of how you secure the desktop. VDI gives you the ability to completely lock down the image from external devices and prevent copying data from the image to a local machine. In addition, remote users benefit as sensitive data is usually stored locally on a laptop. With VDI technology the data is stored on a server in the data centre. Therefore, if the device is stolen or damaged, the information is protected.

BESPOKE DESKTOP TAILORING
Prior to VDI, when a new version of software is released, the planning, inconvenience, logistics and cost of the upgrade can often make it financially unviable for many corporate customers. Now that VDI has arrived, the cost of pushing out the new software release becomes instant, it is done centrally. Gone are the days of upgrading desktop hardware, memory or disk space and gone too are the costs associated to these tasks. VDI also allows for single users, specific departments or management teams to run different versions of new software without having to upgrade the whole estate. This could be useful if your company has seasonal peaks and troughs and needs to scale up or down quickly from a user perspective. Allowing contractors to work in the corporate environment becomes simple as secure/encrypted locked down images is simple when controlled from the data centre.

GREENER IT FUNCTION
As a thin client device is the only device you will need, you will save your organisation money by saving on energy costs as these devices use less power than a normal PC. This will in turn, reduce your organisations carbon footprint.

HOW CAN CMS HELP YOU TO VIRTUALISE?

CMS are currently accredited to deliver virtualisation solutions on behalf of three of the leading virtualisation vendors today. We have superb relationships with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft and can consult and deliver complex solutions both with and for your organisation.

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