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Category Archives: Server Consolidation

From the Bloggers Bench: “I Think I Want to Virtualize…” With Jeff Eberhard

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Jeff EberhardI think I want to virtualize - But how do I consolidate from 10 servers to 3 and still maintain the performance I need?

If you're like a lot of small-midsize businesses I talk to, you're probably sick of adding a new server every time you need to deploy a new application.  The wiring closet you have 10 boxes stuffed in to is getting way too hot, and you don't want to have to rent a larger office, or God forbid, put the latest server under your desk.

The most obvious thing to do then is to virtualize some (or all) of those existing servers, free up that space in your wiring closet, gain higher levels of availability, and best of all – make your life easier.  But now the question comes up – HOW do I size my new servers so that I can provide the same (or better) performance when moving from 10 servers to 2 or 3?  The answer is the VMware Capacity Planner (CP) Assessment. It is a service provided by VMware and our partners that can help you gain insight into your IT resource utilization and help you develop a roadmap for server containment and consolidation!

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A Customer’s Blog Says It All: Don’t Compromise. Virtualize… and More.

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Brandon sweeneyAs a VMware champion for the Mid Market & Small Business market, I want to continually present you with points of view that I hope are relevant to your IT business strategy.  For today's post, I'd like to present a guest blog by our customer George Reed, CIO of Seven Corners.   As a small-midsize company, George knows too well about the IT challenges faced by SMBs and is one of the growing number of rapidly growing businesses who have moved their organization forward by adopting server virtualization as a first step on their journey to the cloud.  In fact, a 68% of SMB organizations expect to increase spending on cloud computing this year.*   Whether you’re just starting to explore your virtualization and cloud options, or have already ventured aggressively forward, please read George’s blog post below.  Perhaps it is time to implement some of the tools he discusses to really simplify your infrastructure and enable IT to focus on driving their top and bottomline impact in your business.  As my good friend Mike Clayville, VP of Product Marketing at VMware, often says, 'Think Big, Be Big'….

I welcome your stories or comments and look forward to your thoughts.

Until next time,
Brandon

If You Want to be Big, You Have to Stop Thinking Small -  A Blog Post by George Reed, Chief Information Officer at Seven Corners   

It may seem like a reading from the Book of Obvious, but the truth is most small
APPROVEDGeorge_reedcompanies dream of doing big things but never stop behaving like a small company.  There are some very basic steps to changing that culture and it requires improvements in the way the company approaches People, Process, and Tools.  For this blog post we’ll focus on the tools aspect, but do bear in mind that Seven Corners changed its people and processes to accommodate more-effective technology to enable aggressive business growth.  Some folks have heard me talk about transforming the technology base of Seven Corners from a small-minded set up with an infrastructure that had become impossible to support, let alone grow with the company to a scalable and agile infrastructure which paved our way to the cloud.  If I had continued in the steps of the past, thinking one small problem, one short day at a time, we’d still have a dusty server room full of outdated desk-tops playing the role of servers.

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VMware in the Midmarket – Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

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Recently, Gartner Inc. published the 2012 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, positioning VMware in the Leaders Quadrant.*

Today, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) represent one of the fastest-growing segments of our customer base, with the majority of SMBs worldwide choosing VMware as their virtualization
provider. In the last three years, we have dramatically increased the number of customers we serve in the SMB segment by introducing solutions and services aimed specifically at the needs of our SMB customers.
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And we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers… Less than a year ago, we announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 5 which delivered more than 200 new features and enhancements that help simplify the lives of our customers while delivering quick and tangible value to their organizations.  Server virtualization with VMware vSphere provides real world advantages including, reduced costs, increased operational efficiencies, simplified and automated IT management, and enhanced disaster recovery options.  These are all the  building blocks that help SMBs transform their IT infrastructure and become ‘Cloud Ready’. 

These advancements provide tangible business benefits to firms like Myron F. Steves and Company.  A Houston-based insurance wholesaler, the IT team at Myron Steves has deployed virtualization and cloud solutions from VMware to help ensure that the company’s 200 employees can respond to customers should disaster strikes. 

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It’s Your Cloud: A Thoughtful Roadmap to Transform Your IT

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6a00d8341c328153ef01630450a4c5970d-120wiIn light of all the interest in the Cloud and Cloud Computing, it seems that the more news that comes out, the more questions arise.  And one can feel like a herd is stampeding towards you telling you to do all or nothing.  The concern I hear time and again from Mid-Market and Small size business CIOs and IT Directors is that they want to jump on board, but they are concerned about a myriad of issues including cost, value and ROI, compliance, uptime, data security, and most importantly, where to begin?    And, depending upon their industry, some of these questions may resonate even more deeply.                                                                                                                                          


It's Not Their Cloud…It's Your Cloud
I’d like to share another real-world example of how to breakhrough the noise and start on a path that can help you pragmatically move your IT Department down a path towards 'Your Cloud' by providing better infrastructure pooling, elasticity, automation and service levels while freeing up IT capacity to drive increased top and bottom-line impact at your company.  Today, we'll discuss Acorda Therapeutics, a mid-market size biotechnology service provider that recently teamed with us and our partner, ICI, and took the first concrete step forward.

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Get Started With Virtualization This Weekend

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Screen shot 2012-05-25 at 10.07.11 AM
If you’re in the US then Memorial Day is upon us and it's a day to honor those who have served our coutry. It also means 3 day weekend and you might be looking for a project to fill in some spare time between BBQs and time with friends and family.  If you’re not in the US, well, then you just have one less day available but all the more reason to use the tips below to help you get a VMware environment up and running at home or in a lab.

Taking on a new technology can be a daunting task so it’s good to know where to start.  Luckily there are a ton of great resources out there and here are a few to get you started.

Step One

Check out one of our past posts that covers the requirementson the hardware side for your setup as well as a few tips on how to get started.

 

Download The Software

There are two options here.  

1) ESXi is the free version of our hypervisor 

2) The vSphere free 60 day evaluation contains ESXi as well as a suite of capabilities around automation, optimization, availability and security.

 

Read Some Tutorials

The vSphere Evaluation Center 

http://www.vmware.com/go/EvaluatevSphere

This is where you would have picked up the free 60 day download of vSphere and it has a ton of great resources to get you started installing and using vSphere.

VMware Knowledge Base (KB)

The KB site has lots of getting started tutorials, deep dives, support solutions, details on error messages and troubleshooting guides.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/microsite.do

Watch Some Videos

VMware KB TV

If you’re more of the video type the  team has you covered.  Here you will find free training videos across a range of vSphere and other VMware related topics to help you get started as well as fine tune your skills.

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/small-business/documentation-and-training.html#classes

Ask The Community

VMware Group on Spiceworks

Spiceworks just hit 2 million users and it’s a great plance  to tap into the community to get advice from IT pros just like you.  These are the people that are working with products like vSphere every day and they’re always willing to help.

http://community.spiceworks.com/group/show/398-vmware

VMware vSphere Community

This is a discussion forum hosted by VMware with links to vSphere and related resources.  Just like Spiceworks you’ll be interacting with people like you who are getting started as well as those who have been using VMware vrtualization products for years.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere

Leave us a comment and let us know how it went over the weekend.  Which links did you find the most helpful?  Do you have any resources of your own that you found to be helpful?  Has this inspired you to write your own getting started with VMware blog post?  What did you BBQ?

I’m virtualized! Now what?

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Many of you may be wondering what virtualization can do for you beyond server virtualization. At VMware, we like to call this the “virtualization journey.” Virtualizing your server hardware infrastructure is really just the first step in the journey to transform your business through IT. RobChen_SmProfile_Virtualization opens the door to greater IT agility, resource utilization and cost savings. It also enables critical solutions, like business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). The ability to maintain business operations in the event of a disaster or an outage is critical to the survival of a business. Failure to have a business continuity and disaster recovery solution in place can result in grim consequences. 

“43% of companies experiencing disasters never re-open, and 29% close within two years.” McGladrey and Pullen 

“93% of businesses that lost their data center for 10 days went bankrupt within one year.” National Archives & Records Administration

So, needless to say, having a reliable and viable business continuity and disaster recovery solution is essential. Thankfully, virtualizing your hardware infrastructure is the first step towards building a solution. The inherent characteristics of virtual machines (partitioning, isolation, encapsulation and hardware dependence) are the building blocks of a BCDR solution. By combining these characteristics with solutions like VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, companies can build a reliable and cost-effective BCDR solution. 

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SMB Success Stories – Myron Steves and Company Slashes Disaster Recover Costs with VMware

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VMware Brandon Sweeney 2009Hi, for those of you that don’t know me, I’m Brandon Sweeney and I lead VMware’s U.S. Mid-Market & Small Business Customer Segment.  I joined VMware 8 years ago and most recently have been running our Americas Partners Organization, serving all our Partner RTMs and Customer Segments.  With our Partner Led model in SMB, leading the Mid-Market and Small Business Segment is a natural extension of my experience and a business for which I am very passionate. 

While we already have tens hundreds of thousands of SMB customers today, we’re building the SMB Business Unit to deliver even greater focus on the needs of Small and Mid-Size Businesses.  Our goal is simple – we want to provide solutions that drive Real Advantage for our Customers by simplifying their IT environments and making IT a competitive advantage for their business.

When I talk with customers, I am always impressed with their stories and wanted to share one with you.  Myron F. Steves and Company is a Houston-based insurance wholesaler that deployed virtualization and cloud solutions from VMware to help ensure the company’s 200 employees can respond to customers should disaster strike.  Myron Steves serves more than 3,000 independent insurance agencies and as  you can imagine, they cannot afford the risk of being incapacitated in the event of a disaster. With the virtualized architecture enabled by VMware, Myron Steves is able to fail over to backup servers within hours instead of days – server failover is now a reliable process and the company has reduced IT costs significantly. 

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March Madness – Is virtualization the answer for navigating toward success and glory?!

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No, I’m not talking about the NCAA basketball tournament that’s currently gripping the minds of college hoops fans. I’m talking about the madness that occurs during the last month of the first fiscal quarter of the year. This is the first check of the year for companies to see if they are on track to achieve their business and financial goals for the year. It’s also the time to adjust and invest, as appropriate, to ensure for a successful year and lay the foundation for continued, sustainable growth.

It’s a pressure-packed and exciting time of the year. Businesses today, and especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), operate in a highly-dynamic and competitive market. Companies must be able to quickly react to changing market conditions and continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of the competition and grow revenues and customers. And they have to do this while containing costs and improving productivity and agility.  To this end, IT departments bear a big burden to deliver a platform that enables innovation, collaboration and efficiency.  IT departments are challenged with:

  • Managing an increasingly complex IT environment
  • Ensuring high application and systems availability
  • Streamlining processes and containing costs
  • Providing instant access from multiple corporate and personal devices

How can IT managers meet these challenges and conquer March Madness??? The solution: virtualization. Yes, virtualization. It may not make you a bracketology expert or help you win the office March Madness pool, but it can help deliver:

  • Infrastructure consolidation and cost savings
  • Application high-availability and business continuity
  • Simplification of server resource and application management
  • Security and centralized patch management
  • A building block for leveraging cloud computing

Hopefully, after reading this, you’re not as panicked. There is a solution to March Madness – after all. In the next blog, we’ll discuss how to get started with virtualization using VMware vSphere – looking at the deployment architecture, hardware requirements and initial installation and configuration.

So, stay tuned and good luck with your March Madness picks!

 

Global Support Services (GSS) Gets Your Technical Questions Answered

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Rick BlytheHi. My name is Rick Blythe and I have worked at VMware for 5 years, making me an old timer here. I work on the Knowledge Management team, where all of our great Knowledgebase articles come from.

I have a very unique position in that I spend my day monitoring social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, engaging customers in new ways almost daily. It’s my job to connect customers with the information you’re looking for, from the support side of operations. No sales or marketing here, I facilitate self-help. An example might be pointing you to our official workaround for a given problem, or alerting you to gotchas we see coming. 

VMware is a very progressive place to work and has embraced social media in a big way, to help our customers where they are, and get to know them better.


 

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Spring is Coming. Time to Clean Up Your Closet.

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One of the benefits of virtualization that customers don’t always talk about is how it can help you to clean up your closet.  Wiring closet that is (or wherever you rack your gear).  Virtualization enables server consolidation and that means fewer boxes that need to be cabled up, translating into a cleaner rack. 

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Virtualization benefits go beyond cleaner racks, offering you: 

  • Hardware cost savings – The more workloads you can fit on a server the fewer servers you have to buy and that means you can spend less and do more with your IT budget.  VMware customers can expect to reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better.
  • Labor efficiency – Fewer servers to manage means you also save time on hardware management tasks.  This could be anything from racking, powering and configuring to daily management and upgrades.  We see customers reducing the time it takes to provision a new server by up to 70% as an example. 
  • Improved Availability – The nature of virtualization makes it much easier to apply fault tolerance and high availability features consistently across your infrastructure to ensure that your applications are always up and running, even in the case of unplanned downtime caused by hardware or application failures.  The centralized management and automation capabilities in vSphere help you easily achieve your availability requirements.

Back to cleaning up your closet, our friends over at Spiceworks are running a contest looking for the best and worst closets with some great prizes. 

Follow this link to find out more:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/202389-return-of-the-cable-closet-contest

We’d love to hear from you too.  Send us links to your before and after pictures and tell us how virtualization has helped you clean up your closet.  And if it has helped you save on hardware, made you more efficient or improved your application availability, we want to hear about that too.