Home > Blogs > VMware SMB Blog > Category Archives: IT Management

Category Archives: IT Management

How Laurens County Health Care System is Now Realizing 65% Decrease in Hardware Costs / Uptime in the 99.999% Range by Deploying Meditech in a Virtualized Environment

Posted on by
1

Post by Brandon Sweeney, Vice President U.S. Mid-Market Businesses

Many midmarket organizations face challenges in equipping their IT infrastructure to support privacy and regulatory protocols and ensure consistent uptime, but those in the health care field have a unique challenge. For a healthcare professional, the reliability needed in their IT environment can literally be the difference between life and death. Finding an IT solution that supports compliance and ensures utmost performance is essential.

Pivotal Turning Points

Laurens County Health Care System, a 90 bed health care organization in Clinton, South Carolina was looking to deploy the Meditech clinical information system to improve patient information and care, as well as enable computerized physician order entry (CPOE). With 30 physical servers in their data center, an offline server could cause multiple facets of their infrastructure to go down. Additionally they found their staff of 11 IT workers often fighting fires instead of proactively addressing business needs. Hospital employees were using so many different laptops and desktops that just maintaining current versions of basic software was difficult. Downtime was up to 40% in the physical data center.

Running Meditech in the current environment was not feasible. Laurens County Health Care System needed to deploy a cost-efficient plan and looked to VMware for a solution.

The Solutions Journey

By deploying VMware vSphere ®, the IT staff virtualized their domain controllers, then implemented Exchange Server internally and moved it to a virtualized infrastructure. By adding vSphere vMotion, they enabled high availability for their virtualized file and print servers, as well as various applications.

“It’s a nightmare maintaining 50 physical PCs on nursing carts. Today, I can roll out 30 virtual desktops in 15 minutes and manage them all from a central location,” said Joe Lovell, IT Infrastructure Manager at Laurens County Health Care System. “Obviously, there are other vendors out there, but given the technical strengths, ease of implementation, and the centralized management capabilities, VMware was the obvious choice.”

Continue reading →

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

Posted on by
2

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:

Continue reading →

Third in a Series: Virtualization Expansion Makeover Debunks the Top 5 Virtualization Myths!

Posted on by

In February, we announced PBS Engineering and Environmental Inc. as the winner of our $100,000 VMware/Dell Journey to Your Cloud Makeover contest. This is the third in our blog series chronicling PBS’s implementation of expanded virtualization and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Everything has been progressing as planned at PBS. The Vancouver disaster recovery center is already up and running with a full 3-2-1 redundant high availability (HA) configuration based on a SAN, two switches and three servers. Throughout the makeover and our discussions with Todd Leavitt, IT Manager at PBS, there’s been one recurring theme – he wishes he would have started virtualization sooner.

So why didn’t he? “I implemented a little slower than I should have because I was very cautious that virtualization was different than what I was used to,” he explains. “I started out with one machine and then virtualized a couple machines with a free version of ESXI host. I ran that for a while to see if I’d have any problems, and it was just incredible. There were no problems, and it became absolutely trustworthy.”

We often hear similar stories from customers who wish that they would have started virtualization, or expanded their use of virtualization, earlier. So we thought it would be helpful to dispel some of the common misconceptions surrounding virtualization for small to medium-sized businesses.

 

Debunking the Top 5 Virtualization Myths Through One Company’s Experience


Myth 1: Change is scary.


IT professionals are understandably wary about rocking the boat, but as PBS’s experience shows, there really is nothing to fear. Or, as Todd puts it, “I think a lot of small businesses might be afraid – the technical people, the IT managers, the network administrators – because virtualization is just different. Everyone is used to one machine with one OS installed on it, and they get stuck on that. It’s amazing, once they take that first step, how easy it is to implement and manage. Don’t fear the change – it’s for the best. It is the future.”

 

Myth 2: My company doesn’t have the manpower.

On the surface, it may seem like implementing or expanding a virtualized environment would require a lot of resources; however, many of our small and medium-sized business customers operate with one-person IT departments. Without virtualization, these businesses would need to hire additional IT staff. As Todd has discovered, virtualization allows you to remain nimble, dynamically adapt to change, address problems as they arise, and accomplish more with far fewer resources.

 

Myth 3: I don’t have the time.

In most cases, virtualization doesn’t take long – usually anywhere from a couple days to a month, depending on the project scope. For example, the timeline for the $100,000 PBS virtualization expansion is roughly one month. And, think of the time and headaches you’ll save in being able to schedule server downtime or take vacation without having to worry about potential server issues. “It’s extremely efficient to be able to do maintenance on servers during the workday now, instead of having to stay until 7:00 p.m.,” Todd says. “And now, there’s significantly less maintenance overall.”

 

Myth 4: Virtualization is expensive.

Virtualization can Continue reading →

Read How Meritrust Achieved Greater IT Performance With VMware, Cisco and NetApp

Posted on by

 Post by Brandon Sweeney

I’d like to share a customer success story about Meritrust Credit Union that many of you in the financial industry can probably relate to. These days, financial institutions are facing demands from customers to develop new products and applications.  Additionally, the pressure is on for them to become more mobile and efficient to meet customer needs, make  improvements to secure sensitive customer data  all while reducing opex and capex and adhering to new regulations.

That’s a tall order, but just like in any other industry,success in financial services comes from earning customer confidence by meeting those needs. Meritrust Credit Union, founded on the pillars of merit and trust, needed an IT solution that enabled them to build around this core business concept and offer solutions to exceed customer expecations. With a small IT headcount, Meritrust was able to leverage VMware’s extensive partner network to employ a multifaceted IT solution to do just that.

 

Business Challenges

Meritrust’s critical business operations were built on their Oracle database, affecting everything from member transactions to accounting, though the existing infrastructure was no longer sufficient to meet growing business demands. Nightly batch processing within the Oracle environment took 16 hours each night to run, leaving no margin for error before beginning business again the next day. Additionally, even a “simple” upgrade would require additional downtime that made it impossible to meet customer needs. The cumbersome environment was difficult to manage and costly to expand in order to accommodate growth.

 

Implementing Powerful Product and Cohesive Partner Solutions

Continue reading →

#vSMBChat Recap: Best Practices to Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure

Posted on by

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:

Continue reading →

VMware’s Partner Exchange Conference – Highlights for Small and Mid-Size Businesses

Posted on by

Weeks after the VMware Partner Exchange Conference, drawing more than 4,000 attendees to Las Vegas, partners are continuing the conversation and collaboration: learning new techniques for identifying customer needs, discovering best practices for acquiring new customers and accelerating their business with go-to-market selling strategies.

One of our partner’s, MicroAge, told us why PEX is important to them and their business.

  • VMware’s virtualization and cloud computing products, solutions, and services 

    From the desktop to the datacenter, VMware offers the most robust and reliable foundation, and has been adopted by the world’s leading organizations, across all industries and in companies of all sizes.  This also attracts Partners/Resellers, like MicroAge, to work with us and share the knowledge and offerings with you the customer.  MicroAge’s COO, Mark McKeever, was focused on learning more about desktop virtualization and Horizon Suite: “Offering these products gives MicroAge a great market opportunity to serve SMBs.”

  • Expansive Partner Network to help implement solutions 

    The VMware partner network has more than 55,000 partners, a huge advantage for mid-market and small businesses to leverage. MicroAge finds that the access to key people at VMware is the best benefit of PEX. Another highlight for MicroAge was meeting Kristen Carnes, Director of Channel Sales with Nimble.  The meeting jump started our relationship and Nimble was at our offices right after PEX to meet with our sales staff.

  • Industry-recognized certification training 

    MicroAge finds VMware to be such a critical partner that their whole sales staff is VSP Certified with many also earning their VTSP. Partners get training and certifications for their company’s specific needs and that brings expertise and builds confidence for VMware customers, giving reassurance for a top-standard design and deployment.

VMware and its Partner Network are critical in helping mid-market and small businesses build IT infrastructures and bringing success for these businesses.

Let us know – whether a Partner or small to mid-size business – what are your top reasons for partnering with VMware?

Second in a Series: Following One Company’s VMware-Dell Makeover – Implementing Virtualization, Disaster Recovery and Management Solutions

Posted on by

A few weeks ago, we announced the winner of the $100,000 VMware/Dell Journey to Your Cloud Makeover contest. This is part two in our ongoing series chronicling the IT transformation of our winner, PBS Engineering and Environmental Inc.

Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, PBS specializes in capturing and hosting engineering and environmental data for schools, hospitals and other large companies. From early conversations, it was clear to John Prann, Service Solution Executive at Dell, that preventing data loss was PBS’s highest priority. He explained, “Through our initial discussions, we found that PBS had a very good grasp of the VMware technology. From a professional services standpoint, we had to decide how to fill in some of the gaps and then build an engagement around that.”

While PBS was initially looking at daily data replication for its disaster recovery ­facility in Vancouver, Washington, over the course of the conversation with John, the PBS IT team decided to use vCenter Site Recovery Manager instead, in order to gain the needed benefits of automation and simplicity. Doug Stephenson, Service Solution Executive at Dell, described the differences, “With replication, you have devices at two different locations holding the same data, and if something were to happen at one location, you manually flip some switches to direct users to the other location. With SRM, the replication is tightly integrated into an automated failover plan, which can be tested and verified prior to failover.”

SRM’s high availability and near-zero downtime are also added benefits. Doug continued, “This solution delivers business continuity and high availability. In the past at PBS, something might go wrong while someone was off work. Now, if there was to be an issue with a server, either virtual or even physical, everything would just automatically failover to another box and stay running. So now people can enjoy their time off.”

Continue reading →

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is finally here!

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

vSphere Data Protection Reduces Backup Storage Consumption by 4x and Makes Recovery Time 6x Faster

Posted on by

Post by Mauricio Barra, Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware

Just a few weeks ago we announced the introduction of vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Advanced, the new edition in VMware’s backup and recovery lineup. VDP Advanced extends the capabilities of VDP, included with vSphere, with greater scalability (4 times that of VDP) and integration with MS Exchange and SQL Server.

 

When we announced VDP Advanced we also talked about how it delivers the most efficient backup capabilities with the simplest management for vSphere. Today, we are happy to show you the data supporting our claims.

 

VMware asked the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) to test and develop a Lab Validation Report on VDP in order to quantify the efficiency in data deduplication and recovery time, as well as to qualify the ease of use delivered by the product. For those of you considering giving VDP Advanced a go when it becomes generally available during Q1, let me remind you that both VDP solutions share the same underlying technology, so these findings will be of great interest to you too.

 

4X less backup storage consumed

ESG found that VDP can reduce backup storage by up to 99% compared to not using deduplication. However, some level deduplication is pretty much a table stake among backup solutions, so the following should put the results in clearer context. ESG also found that VDP’s unique variable-length deduplication can decrease backup storage by a factor of 4 compared to commonly used fixed-length deduplication technologies. According to these findings, backup solutions using fixed-block deduplication would require 7.1TB of storage capacity (60 days retention period) to backup 1.6TB of primary data, or approximately 20 virtual machines (assuming an average 80GB of data per VM). Using the same 7.1TB of capacity and same retention period, VDP can protect an astonishing 6TB of primary data, or 75 virtual machines of the same size. Ultimately, what this means is that VDP and VDP Advanced customers get a much bigger bang for their buck, either protecting larger environments with the same capacity, or redirecting their existing storage investments to other business priorities. The report includes an interesting “Cost of Ownership” analysis that shows how this efficiency could save you over $100K on storage depending on the size of your environment and the tier of your arrays.

Continue reading →

Storage Optimization with VMware Horizon View

Posted on by

Post by Narasimha Krishnakumar, Product Management, End-User Computing

Properly designing and sizing storage is key to successfully deploying virtual desktops. Transitioning from pilot to production is completely dependent on getting both the storage design and sizing right. If you get this wrong- you will negatively affect user experience, application responsiveness and your cost per desktop.

So how do you get it right?

Ultimately, you will need to ensure that your VDI environment is designed to support adequate capacity and performance. Translating a physical laptop/desktop environment to a desktop VM typically requires about 40GB of storage capacity and 15 to 200 IOPS . In addition, the IO pattern is made up of steady state events during which it is dominated by small block random writes and highly correlated peak events which can be dominated by either reads or writes. These shifts complicate storage sizing and design for VDI.

In the end, you have two ways to overcome these challenges:

  1. Leverage new product features
  2. Implement new storage architectures
When it comes to features, VMware has introduced a number of new features to help you along the way.
  • View Replica Tiering– View 4.5 enabled customers to take advantage of replica tiering. This feature was primarily driven by changes in the storage industry and the advent of Flash/SSDs as a Tier within storage arrays. With View Replica Tiering, customers can leverage their investments in Flash/SSD and get better performance in VDI deployments.  At a high level, this feature allows customers to place replicas of parent VM’s on a separate datastore which is based on Flash/SSD drives. By placing the replica on faster tier storage, all read IO operations are directly served from the Flash SSD. This is highly beneficial in VDI environments, which tend to have highly correlated events such as boot and login storms that generate a lot of read IOs to the storage subsystem.
    Further, customers can set aside a high performance storage tier for addressing their peak read operations and focus on sizing for steady state IO’s to cut costs. Cost savings can be really significant in environments that use storage arrays with a combination of spinning disk drives and SSDs.
    An important point to note here is that View Replica Tiering is a feature that should be used in conjunction with View Composer Linked Clones.
  • View Storage Accelerator (VSA) – For read performance acceleration VMware has introduced the View Storage Accelerator. With this capability, customers only need to set aside a small portion (100MB to 2GB) of ESX RAM as cache that can be used by View. The cache is a content based read cache and leverages the vSphere platform feature known as Content Based Read Cache (CBRC). Continue reading →