Virtualisation

Virtualisation allows businesses to maximise the performance of their IT hardware resources, and in so doing making IT more flexible and cost-effective. It works by running multiple “virtual machines” side by side on the same hardware. In so doing virtualisation has now moved beyond mainframes and servers and has found its way into applications, networks and storage, among others.

CMS offers the VMware approach to virtualisation which inserts a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This software layer creates virtual machines and contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer.

VMware also offers a robust virtualisation platform that can scale across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure. The VMware virtual infrastructure is ideal for production environments in part because they run on industry-standard servers and desktops and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure.

CMS customers who have adopted the VMware virtual infrastructure solutions have reported significant improvements through:

• Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization enabling significantly higher resource utilisation by pooling common infrastructure resources

• Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction by reducing the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre, reducing power and cooling requirements

• Improved Operational Flexibility and Responsiveness allowing IT administrators to spend less time on repetitive configuration, monitoring and maintenance tasks.

• Increased Application Availability and Improved Business Continuity through the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.

• Improved Desktop Manageability and Security.

For details of our next technical workshop on Virtualisation contact us.