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Category Archives: Infrastructure & Operations Management

Who is Your IT Hero? Call for Nominations Now Open!

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We are excited to announce the launch of our VMwareSMB IT Hero search!

Does your business have an IT pro that you couldn’t work without? Are you an IT whiz that keeps your company’s tech running smoothly? We want to hear from you! The VMware SMB team is on the search to recognize the unsung IT Heroes that make a business hum. An added bonus: the IT Heroes selected will win some awesome prizes and VMware loot!

Enter Today!

Over the next 6 months we’ll be searching for IT professionals who have performed so well at their jobs that many would call them an ‘IT Hero’.  Nominations are open to individuals who are themselves IT Heroes as well as anyone who would like to get their IT Hero some recognition. Each month a committee from the VMwareSMB team will review the submissions received and select one to represent that month’s official IT Hero. We’ll recognize a total of 6 VMware IT Heroes over the course of our search.

Once selected, monthly IT Heroes will win a prize pack from VMware plus special graphics for their social media channels to highlight their IT Hero distinction. Each hero will also be recognized on the VMware SMB blog to share their IT insights and best practices with the community.

What are you waiting for? Make your nomination today! Follow VMware SMB on Facebook, Twitter, Spiceworks and Google+ for more blog posts, conversation with your peers, and additional insights on IT issues facing small to midmarket businesses.

For more contest information and official rules, see Terms and Conditions below:

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New eBook: Top Four Reasons to Expand Virtualization of Your IT Environment

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VMware SMB

In a recent survey of more than 1,000 small to midmarket businesses, 68% say they plan to spend more on virtualizing their infrastructure this year than they did last year. Although cutting costs remains a key driver of virtualization, companies that have already implemented virtualization are seeing plenty of additional benefits.

Demands on IT departments are changing, from increased pressures to implement BYOD policies for users to scalability issues, and expanding on virtualization remains a key step for laying a foundation for a small to midmarket organization’s infrastructure.

Download this free eBook to get the top 4 reasons why you need to expand virtulization in your IT environment  and what your midmarket or small business stands to gain – beyond cost savings:

  • Learn how to prevent outages with a resource-constrained environment
  • Discover how you can be among the 73% of companies that have reduced significant time investments in routine administrative tasks.
  • Hear from other companies on how expanding virtualization has improved their business.

What were your top reasons for expanding virtualization? Share them with us here.

#vSMBChat Recap: Best Practices to Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure

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Last Wednesday we hosted another Twitter chat (#vSMBChat) for the SMB community to share best practices and information on virtual infrastructure management.

We were joined by an active group of participants and our moderators Alan Renouf, Senior Technical Marketing Architect for VMware, and special guest Jonathan Frappier. Our chat covered a variety of topics around VIM, ranging from the benefits of going virtual to user recommended tools for virtual management. Here is a look at the conversation:

 

1)    What is the biggest benefit of using virtual servers verses physical servers?

Both Alan and Jonathan agreed that the benefits would vary depending on business goals. However, each highlighted some of the benefits you could achieve:

Our Participants were quick to add some of the benefits they’ve experienced as well:

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VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is finally here!

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Post by Mauricio Barra, Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware

Ever since we introduced VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) back in August 2012, we have seen tremendous interest with over 10,000 of our customers downloading this backup solution that comes bundled for free with their vSphere 5.1 platform. As we have gathered feedback from these VDP users over the past few months, many of them expressed their desire for a solution that would extend these backup capabilities even further. Well, it is finally here!

VDP Advanced is generally available and ready for any vSphere customer that wants to reap the benefits of deduplication efficiency and management simplicity experienced with VDP, and expand them beyond their current reach with a backup virtual appliance that is 4 times larger than VDP’s. Additionally, VDP Advanced introduces agents that integrate with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server at the guest level.

What’s really great about VDP Advanced is that it’s tailored for the specific needs of midsize organizations, yet it’s based on enterprise-class technology, a combination that makes it the most cost-effective backup solution for vSphere environments.

Here’s why you should be interested in VDP Advanced

Using patented variable-length deduplication, VDP Advanced reduces backup storage consumption by a factor of 4 compared to other solutions using fixed-length deduplication. This ability to consolidate storage or simply invest in different projects should be extremely attractive for SMBs that are typically constrained in resources.

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From the Bloggers Bench: Do More with Less – High VM Density

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Post by VMware Systems Engineer Kris Walsh

As a Systems Engineer working in the mid-market and small business space, I have the privilege of talking to people with 0 to 2000 virtual machines.  A very common theme I hear is “We have a new mission in IT.  ‘Do more with less.’”  Ever heard that one?  You might be hearing the knives sharpening, getting ready to take a slice from your budget.

What does “Do more with less” even mean?  It’s a vague and ambiguous paradox. The reality is YOU are expected to do more with less these days.  It’s a business trend.  That’s easy to do…  In opposite land, maybe…

I’d like to share a few “do more with less” tools I recommend to my customers.  The ultimate goal, and purpose of this blog is, High VM Density.

 

Have More IT Infrastructure Than Is Necessary?

Most customers I talk to have a very low VM density (1-10 VMs per Host).  This equates
to more IT infrastructure than is necessary.  More IT infrastructure is less efficient and messier for you!

High VM Density’s value centers on operational efficiency providing lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and the ability to “do more with less” – less servers, storage, networking, software licenses, etc.  High VM density has always been a strength of VMware vSphere.  Every year we enhance our hypervisor technology & incorporate new features, further improving the synergistic effect that boosts the highest VM density on the market… But that can only help so much.

 

Stop Overprovisioning Your VMs – Save Money

You need to stop overprovisioning your VMs!  It’s expensive.  We’re trying to save money, not waste resources.  All too often I hear, “But how do I know that ‘just right’ size?”  “I can’t compromise performance.” or “I get requests for a certain VM configuration and give it.” Continue reading →

Introducing VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced

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By Mauricio Barra, Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware

I am excited to announce the evolution of VMware vSphere Data Protection with a new edition called VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced, which is VMware’s backup and recovery solution designed for midsize vSphere environments.

As many of you know, vSphere Data Protection (VDP) was introduced with VMware vSphere 5.1 as a feature included with vSphere Essentials Plus and above. Replacing the legacy backup feature VMware Data Recovery, VDP enabled our customers to protect small environments with a more robust and reliable solution.

With VDP Advanced, we extend the capabilities of VDP to enable any midsize customer to protect their entire vSphere environment.

 

Greater scalability and application awareness

VDP Advanced provides greater scalability with up to 8TB of deduplicated data per virtual appliance, four times as much as VDP delivers. Expect this 8TB to protect approximately 200 virtual machines (VMs) based on average storage and retention requirements, and just as in VDP, remember that you can scale beyond 8TB by deploying several VDP Advanced virtual appliances.

VDP Advanced also provides application-aware protection for the most prominent, mission-critical applications found in most environments, namely Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. By running agents from within the VM, VDP Advanced ensures application consistency, which is a crucial state to guarantee reliable protection of these applications. This approach also enables more granular backup and recovery of individual databases.

 

Cost-effective backup and recovery designed for vSphere

VDP has experienced some impressive adoption with over 10,000 VMware customers having downloaded the solution since it became available in vSphere 5.1 in September 2012. The popularity of VDP can be explained through the benefits it delivers, all of which are also available with VDP Advanced.

Based on EMC Avamar technology, both VDP and VDP Advanced feature variable-length deduplication performed across all the VMs targeted to the VDP virtual appliance. Additionally, when application-specific agents are deployed, deduplication in VDP Advanced is performed inside the VM, which unlocks even greater efficiency. The unique variable-length, global, client-side deduplication engine in VDP Advanced reduces backup storage by up to 95% and backup network bandwidth by up to 99%, enabling you to experience important cost savings in your backup infrastructure.

However, Capex savings mean little without the Opex component to support them. VDP Advanced is the ideal backup solution for your virtual environment because it is designed to simplify the life of the vSphere administrator. Creating backup jobs is a simple wizard-driven setup and recovering VMs or individual files is a one-step process. Seamlessly integrated with vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client, VDP Advanced dramatically reduces operational overhead because it allows you to manage backup and recovery of your VMs from the same UI as your vSphere infrastructure.

We understand IT organizations can be constrained in time and resources and that you can’t afford to deal with complicated and expensive products. That is why we are excited to deliver a product with enterprise-class deduplication, yet simple not only in management but also from a licensing perspective. VDP Advanced is licensed per CPU, which means that you can protect as many VMs as needed on your licensed vSphere hosts. Licensing VDP Advanced is as simple as matching the number of vSphere licenses and your environment will be protected and ready to go.

VDP Advanced is available for purchase a-la-carte, or included in the entirely new vSphere with Operations Managements Acceleration Kits (Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions). Each one of these kits includes everything you need to get your vSphere environment started, including the ability to protect it with the most efficient and simple backup and recovery.

If you want to learn more about VDP Advanced, visit the website. And if you are already a user of VDP, remember than you can easily upgrade to take advantage of the scalability and application awareness of VDP Advanced.

 

At Washington Trust Bank, Data Security and Mobility Come Together

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Blog post by Brandon Sweeney

We know that for those in the financial industry, a paramount business objective is keeping proprietary data and sensitive customer information secure.  With more and more of today’s workforce operating remotely, and using multiple devices, securing sensitive data is an even greater challenge.

Washington Trust Bank, the oldest and largest privately owned bank in the Pacific Northwest, understands too well these challenges and looked to VMware for a solution.  I’d like to share with you the success story about how they ventured to resolve this challenge and brought data security and mobility together.

Easing the Growing Pains

As Washington Trust Bank’s business grew, so did growing pains in their existing IT infrastructure, especially with regard to data storage, security, disaster recovery and Continue reading →

From the Bloggers Bench: NEW! vSphere 5.1 with Operations Management – A MUST

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Blog post by Mike Fegan

There were a lot of exciting announcements this year at VMworld 2012. One announcement that stuck was the release of vSphere 5.1 which has further simplified the IT transformation journey for the small to midsized business (SMB). As I consult with customers daily about options and ways to address IT challenges and help develop a roadmap to a more simplified and agile IT environment, it was great to see the enthusiasm and recognition by the SMB audience for this vSphere 5.1 announcement and the ways this will address your needs.  I wanted to share this with you asap!

vSphere 5.1 includes amazing features, such as: vSphere Replication, vSphere Storage Appliance, vCenter Data Protect, and vShield Endpoint. This means that with every acceleration kit customers get everything they need to virtualize and can gain the benefits of shared storage without having to purchase a SAN.  Benefits include data replication for DR, VM backup with file-level restore and anti-virus off-load.  We will dig into these features in more detail in future posts but for now I want to focus on a new acceleration kit announced with the 5.1 release; vSphere 5.1 with Operations Management. Continue reading →

VMworld 2012: Introducing the New VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 for SMBs

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By Julia Lee, product marketing manager, Infrastructure Products, VMware

Exciting times here at VMworld 2012 as we finally, can talk publicly about some of the product developments we have been working on in this past year.  With today’s announcement of VMware vSphere® 5.1 solutions to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs), we unveiled VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1.

For those of you not familiar with VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, it enables you to transform the local storage within your servers into a shared storage resource that runs your virtualized applications. VSA allows you to achieve business continuity and eliminates any single point of failure within your IT environment. Let’s dive into some of the new features behind today’s announcement:
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SMB Pressures and Challenges Solved with Virtualization and Cloud Initiatives

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Guest Post by Mark Bowker, ESG Senior Analyst 
ESG-MarkBowker
I’m always impressed when I see IT organizations that are strapped for resources and operating in firefighting mode take the initiative to turn around and successfully create a positive impact on the business as a whole. I’ll admit that when I was in IT, I had a few moments of brilliance, but it was so hard to break away from the daily tasks of simply maintaining the investments we had on hand. Virtualization and cloud computing are certainly poised to enable amazing success for IT organizations that are ready to learn and embrace a better way of computing and delivering IT services.

ESG recently spoke with a few SMB IT organizations and published a white paper on the current and planned success of virtualization and cloud initiatives, the success they are having with transforming desktop and application delivery, and how cloud is becoming a preferred consumption model.  The information we captured was fascinating and ranged from efficiencies in blocking and tackling:

“Having one view is very important—when administrators have to switch over to different management consoles to access systems, that is really hard.  Now we can do faster deployments and day-to-day tasks.”

—Infrastructure Architect, IT services firm

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