VMware Global Alliances Blog

Posted by Frances Fortanely
Americas HP Alliance Marketing

Virtually There is a new learning environment designed to help Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) leverage the power of virtualization for competitive advantage. Created jointly by HP and VMware, the site features a host of valuable tools—from white papers and solution briefs to an ROI calculator and self assessment—that enable SMBs to evaluate how to implement virtualization at a low cost.

SMBs that think virtualization may be too much will be particularly interested in registering for three on-demand webinars:

• Virtualization 101: Launching into Cloud Computing for SMBs
• Setting Virtual Priorities: Which Applications Should You Virtualize First
• Optimizing the World of IT for End Users: Balancing Freedom and Choice with Security and Compliance to Meet Business

This final webinar was recorded live, in front of an SMB audience, in Austin.

Review the data sheets showcasing SMB solutions from HP and VMware. Enter information into the ROI calculator to determine your potential savings from server consolidation using VMware vSphere^®.  Answer a brief questionnaire and receive a smart paper that consolidates multiple sources of information into an executive summary based on your input.

Affordable, enterprise-level virtualization solutions are available for your SMB. Visit Virtually There to learn more.

Posted by Anne Catambay, Director,
Global Outbound Alliance Marketing

Marketing folks can talk all day about the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing, but it’s the CIO and the IT organization that need to put the technology into action.

That’s why I got a positive jolt from two recent interviews with Mark Egan, CIO of VMware, in which he talked about our company’s own IT and the exceptional value it delivers to our business and, ultimately, to our partners and customers.

I was nodding my head while I was reading, thinking, “YES, this is the way IT at successful enterprises need to focus in the coming year, not just at VMware but across our partner and customer organizations.”

Don’t miss these interviews, conducted by two separate publications, Express Computer Online and CIO Forum, around Mark’s recent trip to India.  He has some interesting things to say about technology adoption in that emerging market, but his main focus is about how technologies like virtualization and cloud computing are accelerating both IT and business transformation worldwide.

Mark’s message, when you boil it down, comes to this: IT needs to go beyond keeping the lights on by contributing to the company’s bottom line and taking a leadership role in driving up customer satisfaction levels. 

“When you look at virtualization you are initially going to focus on saving money, but beyond that it's about speed and agility,” Mark told Express Computer. “We can have a lot more impact on business than we did in the past.”

Improving the Ease of Doing Business

One of our own company’s primary goals, Mark continues, is to make it easier for customers to do business with us.  As he points out, VMware is definitely “eating our own dog food” with 97percent of our own environment virtualized. Virtualization, as he explains, is the first step toward cloud computing which, along with the trends in mobile and socialization, are critical for IT professionals to embrace.

Mark goes into more detail in his talk with CTO Forum, mapping out the phases of virtualization and where India currently sits on that journey.  He discusses some of the key issues that are shaping the future for IT everywhere, including cloud computing, security needs, cost-savings factors, virtual machine management, end user computing, investment in India and more.

Both of these conversations make great reading for CIOs and everyone in IT. Whether you work in India or Indianapolis, you’ll come away realizing that the role of IT is changing in some very exciting ways and that VMware, the virtualization and cloud infrastructure leader, is helping to make it happen.

Express Computer Online Article
CTO Forum

Posted by Link Alander, LSCS, Associate Vice
Chancellor for Technology Services and Pearl Goitia,
VMware, Sr. Customer Reference Manager

When an organization is in the throes of a large virtualization initiative, it’s sometimes hard to remember the beginning. That isn’t the case at Lone Star College System (LSCS) where Link Alander, Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Services, is crystal clear on how they got started, the goals they have achieved and what they have left to accomplish. I recently caught up with Link Alander to ask a few questions about how things are going at LSCS.

VMware: Tell us about LSCS and the number of students you support.

Link Alander: LSCS is a publicly funded, two-year community college located in Houston. It’s the largest institution of higher education in the area and the largest community college system in Texas. We’ve had tremendous student population growth in six years. Today, LSCS has 78,000 “traditional” students pursuing two-year associate degrees from multiple campus locations. We also provide educational opportunities to 23,000 “nontraditional” enrollees through nondegree courses and adult education programs.

VMware: What challenges were you looking to overcome that led you to consider virtualizing your datacenters?

Alander:  When our new CIO, Shah Ardalan came on board in February 2008, LSCS already had a small VMware installation. I was tasked to redesign our core systems. Instead of supporting a confederation of multiple sites, I wanted us to move to a consistent, centralized model for all IT services, which meant reining in our six campus sites, as well as the eight smaller satellite centers that accessed our data, but couldn’t afford their own datacenters. Our team believed that virtualizing the majority of our physical servers was critical in order to efficiently manage the centralized environment and provide high availability for our key campus applications. We started at about 5 percent virtualized and have quickly moved to 93 percent virtualized.

You can hear Link describe our progress at LSCS in some detail:

VMware:  Why did you subsequently choose the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution?

Alander:  We evaluated Microsoft’s Hyper V, but it was very immature compared to VMware vSphere. When we completed a virtualization assessment to evaluate the consolidation opportunities and calculate the potential savings, the ROI on a joint VMware, Cisco and EMC solution spoke for itself and we got approval to move all of our campuses to the new environment quite easily.

VMware: What advantages has the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution provided to LSCS?

Alander: There are many, but let me give you one example. LSCS is committed to guaranteeing “five nines” availability for Tier-1 applications. VMware, Cisco and EMC provided the only solution that could provide the high availability we required. Now, we have virtualized nearly every Tier-1 and -2 application, including our new ERP system, Active Directory, Exchange, and SQL. We’ve also built a private cloud, which has enabled us to achieve greater elasticity and flexibility.

VMware: What impact has the VMware, Cisco and EMC solution brought to your IT infrastructure?

Alander: We’ve experienced tremendous benefits from improving operational flexibility and efficiency to improving environmental savings. We’ve dramatically reduced deployment times, achieved high availability and improved disaster recovery. On the cost side, we’ve achieved significant savings in power, space and cooling. We’ve obtained ROI in just three years and nine months—and we’ve reduced hardware and capital costs by about $600,000, which is a tremendous improvement.

VMware: Thank you for your time, Link. We hope to catch up with you again next year at VMworld.

Posted by Vaughn Stewart
NetApp, Director & Virtualization
Evangelist

Since VMworld 2011 there’s been a noticeable increase in customer confidence around the ability to successfully virtualize the most demanding business critical applications. The list of applications commonly being considered often includes business applications powered by database technologies like Oracle RAC and Microsoft SQL Server and Messaging and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint. With all of this activity the application that is generating as many discussions as any of the others is SAP.

With customers confident  in the capabilities of vSphere 5 to facilitate significant infrastructure cost reductions with multi-tier SAP landscapes, many still have questions on how to successfully virtualize such a large-scale architecture. You have to understand that for many customers SAP is ‘THE’ mission critical application within their organization. An interruption to SAP can have massive impact to an organization, thus there is no room for any unexpected ‘lessons learned’ like the early days of server consolidation, desktop virtualization, or lab automation initiatives.

Customers often pose the question…

                                  “How do I successfully virtualize SAP?”

 From my perspective this is a relatively simple question to answer…

“Deploy as SAP has, virtualize SAP with VMware on NetApp!”

SAP Runs SAP Virtualized with VMware and NetApp

In order to reduce ever increasing infrastructure costs and to automate the delivery of IT services, SAP committed to a ‘Virtualization First’ strategy in their global IT, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Center of Excellence and SAP Business ByDesign (SaaS & PaaS cloud service offerings) datacenters. To accomplish these goals SAP abandoned legacy architectures and began deploying their future with technologies and platforms from VMware and NetApp.

By the end of 2010 these efforts resulted in over 40% of SAP’s compute systems virtualized on VMware vSphere and 70% of their worldwide storage requirements residing on NetApp. Frankly, I don’t know if one can make it a simpler or more compelling case around how to virtualize SAP.

It’s not just SAP virtualizing SAP with vSphere on NetApp. Below is a list of customer case studies published within the past 12 months that highlight the outstanding results of their efforts.

• MAGURA GmBH & Co. KG
• Magna International
• Hero Foodservice
• Extend IT
• Computacenter
• Baldwin-Wallace College
• Oesterreichische Kontrollbank
• K+S Group and Fujitsu FlexFrame
• Siemens
• Dominion Enterprises

vSphere 5 Powers SAP at Near Bare-Metal Levels

As one might expect, customers often want to understand a bit more than simply the architecture in which to virtualize SAP.. Many want assurances around the performance capabilities of the vSphere platform. Fortunately, there are a number of recently published benchmarks that demonstrate the capabilities of vSphere 5. In August, Fujitsu published the first SAP sales and distribution (SD) benchmark on vSphere 5 along with a corresponding benchmark comprised of a bare metal deployment comprised of the same hardware.

The benchmarks took advantage of the new larger VM support in vSphere 5, supporting 4,600 SD Users and 25,150 SAPs from a 24-vCPU VM on the Fujitsu Primergy server. These results were within 6% of what was obtained from the bare metal configuration (4,875 SD Users and 26,630 SAPs).

HP published an even larger scale benchmark, comprised of a three-tier SAP Landscape on vSphere 5 which supported 32,125 SD Users and delivered 175,320 SAPs. The results produced in all of these benchmarks are a testament to the performance capabilities of vSphere 5 and it’s ability to meet real world workloads.

FlexPod, CVDs, and Partners: Delivering Virtualized SAP Applications & SAP Landscapes

Building on the foundational architectures and performance capabilities, many seek assurances around the design and implementation of their solution. This is where the efforts of the FlexPod engineering teams really stand out. They have recently published a Cisco Validated Design for deploying SAP Applications and SAP Landscapes in vSphere on the FlexPod platform.

This private cloud architecture covers the entire infrastructure stack including SAP, Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), NetApp Unified Storage, VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Database. For those who need secure separation of resources in their shared infrastructure the CVD includes the designs for deploying in a Secure Multi-Tenancy architecture.

A number of FlexPod partners specialize in delivering SAP and have developed expertise in the area of migrating SAP to a virtualized FlexPod architecture. One leader in this space is Accenture, who has developed the SAP Private Cloud Solution. Collaboratively designed by engineering teams from Accenture, SAP, Cisco, NetApp, VMware and Red Hat, this solution expands the FlexPod CVD architecture by including services such as consulting, migration, and project management. Together these capabilities help make the migration of SAP to vSphere simple.

Through partners like Accenture, customers receive a standardized virtual infrastructure for SAP, dramatically shorter migration timeframes, advanced SAP automation and a number of advanced features such as SAP analytics and mobility capabilities.

Wrapping Up This Post

The move to virtualizing business critical applications like SAP is viewed by many as critical to the advancement of the maturity of their private cloud. Such applications are often significantly more complex in areas of design and scale. Projects to virtualize such complex and critical application are typically monitored a bit more closely and their success measured a bit more precisely than previous virtualization projects like server consolidations.

Ensuring the success of our customers and their virtualization initiatives is the focus of VMware, NetApp, SAP and our mutual technology partners. In this post I hope to have shared with you that the time is now to begin virtualizing your SAP Landscape. As I’ve shared in this post; SAP has done it, vSphere 5 can power it, the FlexPod platform was designed for it, and our SAP focused partners can deliver it!

If you’re interested in additional information around virtualizing SAP on VMware & NetApp please checkout the following links:

• SAP Technology Partner Overview: NetApp
• SAP Technology Partner Overview: VMware
• NetApp SAP Solutions
• NetApp SnapManager for SAP
• VMware SAP Solutions
• VMware Virtualizing SAP Kit

Posted by Phil Grove, CSC
Global Director of End User Services

Workforce agility is a priority for both private and public sector companies globally. CSC commissioned  a Cloud Index to survey 4000 IT decision makers on three continents and 33% of respondents identified access to enterprise information from disparate devices like smartphones, tablets (Apple iPad, Lenovo ThinkPad, and others), laptops, netbooks or thin clients located anywhere in the world as the number one driver for cloud adoption.  Virtual desktop, in both a hosted and cloud delivery vector, will enable organizations to enjoy seamless access to familiar business applications, files and settings.  

CSC is leading the way for end user computing by basing CSC Dynamic Desktop (hosted) and CSC CloudDesktop on VMware View. CSC customers gain a complete, well managed virtualized desktop on several delivery vectors which will enhance the agility of their user population and increases security by moving data away from end-user devices back into the datacenter. Organizations also benefit from solutions that are cost effective and more efficient to provision and manage.

Customers sensitive to compliance, business continuity and disaster recovery choose Dynamic Desktop. By combining virtualization and secure access technologies CSC is able to deliver highly flexible personal computing environments that are accessible from many end user devices. The partnership with VMware is accelerating our ability to bring SmartWorkPlace^SM to more enterprises faster. SmartWorkPlace is the CSC strategy aimed at enabling the agile enterprise to improve the productivity of the knowledge worker.

Listen to this clip to hear why View 5 is an ideal option for customers:

Posted by Frank Pfaffernoschke
HP, Sr. Strategic Alliance Manager

Security and compliance continue to be hot topics as organizations embark on their journey to the cloud. Customers today require an integrated framework for comprehensive protection that is cost effective, simple and adaptive.

As VMware helps businesses of all sizes migrate to secure cloud computing and enable them to trust in their cloud, we are pleased to announce that we have expanded our secure cloud offerings with HP through its newly launched Cloud Protection Program (PDF) to address customer requirements around cloud protection and compliance.

We are excited to work with HP to empower our customers to mitigate threats described by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) and other cloud threat analysis documents.

As a part of this collaboration, below is an overview of our efforts:

• The initial release of HP’s Cloud Protection Foundation Service (page 2 of PDF) is based on VMware cloud infrastructure, which includes VMware vShield™, VMware vSphere™, and VMware vCloud Director®.

• VMware technology is aligned with the HP Cloud Protection Reference Architecture (page 3 of PDF), which provides an organized approach to facilitate discussion and planning to build a customized and compliant, secure enterprise hybrid cloud environment for VMware based infrastructures. 

• Additionally, VMware is working closely with HP on joint testing, integration and architectural design, furthering cloud security research and solution development.

By extending our relationship with HP, we hope to deliver a blueprint for organizations of all sizes to follow in their journey to secure cloud computing.

Posted by Bob Goldsand
Alliances Partner Architect

When VMware and NetApp team up, customers get a demonstration of our solutions’ abilities—availability, manageability, flexibility and mobility. That’s exactly what happened at Green Mountain Power (GMP), the  second largest utility provider in Vermont servicing more than 100,000 customers. GMP is a leader in wind and solar power generation.

During the company’s initiative to virtualize Oracle Applications and RAC Databases (see blog Episode I), Vermont was hit very badly by Hurricane Irene. Quickly, GMP had approximately 50,000 customers without power and call volumes to GMP went from about 4,500 calls per week to nearly 15,000 during the course of the hurricane.

At GMP, the mission-critical Storm Manager applications used during the crisis were virtualized and running on vSphere. GMP decided to shut down several test instances of Oracle and vMotion, non-critical applications running in its vSphere cluster to provide additional resources for its Global Information and Outage Management Systems. These mission-critical systems were being used by first responders, dispatch and customer service representatives throughout the disaster. The GMP decision to leverage vSphere workload management capabilities on its hosts was instrumental in keeping GMP mission critical systems from overloading as these very important systems running on vSphere remained 100 percent available throughout the hurricane and subsequent storm recovery.

GMP’s experience is just one example of how vSphere frees enterprise infrastructure from the physical limitations of a single server, and delivers the fundamental ability benefits—availability, manageability, flexibility and mobility—of running mission-critical systems in a virtualized infrastructure. By running its systems on vSphere, GMP was able to respond to its business needs faster and more efficiently than it ever could have running in an entirely physical infrastructure environment. With VMware and NetApp solutions, GMP restored 4 servers in less than two hours.

Lesson 4: Be Prepared and Know the Bottleneck

In a major event such as a hurricane, a lot happens and it happens very quickly. In GMP’s case, some of the non-critical vSphere hosts required recovery. The fact that these hosts were virtualized and deployed on NetApp storage greatly simplified and facilitated the recovery process. Using vSphere features such as host profiles and templates, as well as NetApp utilities like SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructures (SMVI) and SnapManger for Oracle (SMO) significantly reduced the recovery times from days to a matter of hours.

GMP’s Paula Fortin, a senior system administrator, believes the recovery would not have been possible if GMP had still been on physical servers. Hearing Paula Fortin describe what happened during Hurricane Irene and the subsequent recovery should help anyone still wondering about virtualization to answer the question: “Why should I virtualize?”

Lesson 5: Choose the Right Storage Provider

It’s critical to work with the right storage provider when deploying mission-critical applications. Not only do NetApp solutions integrate with vSphere, but the NetApp unified storage platform also integrates with Oracle features including Real Application Clusters (RAC), Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Automated Storage Management (ASM). Plus, as I mentioned, NetApp technologies played a significant role in the deployment strategies and recovery efforts.

Learn More

The GMP virtualization journey is proof that you can effectively run mission-critical Oracle enterprise solutions on vSphere and gain all of the ability benefits from a vSphere and NetApp environment. Whether your organization is running a single instance database, RAC databases or Oracle application suites, vSphere and NetApp solutions can run them more efficiently.  

Hear more from Nayab Saiyad and Paula Fortin of GMP from VMworld 2011.