What more can be gained from vmware

[Abhare]

Hi All,

here is a scenario for u all,

If a company is being supported by 200 virtual machines (15 esx servers,2 Virtual center),with HA,Vmotion and DRS Enabled.

virtal machines are hosting both unix and windows servers.

There are approx. 2000 users in that company.

There are some mission critical applications being used by users,these application are hosted in vm's.

What is the best possible improvement that can be done in the above scenario.

Can something be done on appliaction front to improve the performance,availability and other important factors..

Comapny is ready to use new vmware component..

Can virtual appliances and cloud like technologies can be introduced,if yes.How?

Main objetive of company is to show some kind of cost effectiveness using vmware as its already been implemented.

Thanks in advance.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the Enterprise Strategy and Planning forum.




Dave

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[weinstein5]

It depends what you are looking for - if you are running VI-3 you can upgrade to vSphere for improved performance as well thin disk provisioning to save on SAN disk, improved VM characteristics.

If you have not virtualized your desktops look at VMware View or ThinApp for application virtualization

Lab Manager to suppport any development you have inhouse

SRM for disaster recovery

Just to name a few -

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[AndreTheGiant]

With an upgrade to vSphere you can also use VMware FT on some VMs (see )

In your post I do not see the backup strategy. With vSpere you can use products that work faster (see for example Veeam Backup speed improvement on vSphere).

Also, as written before, plan a disaster recovery solution.

Andre

[depping]

I would start with aligning your OPS to Virtualization. Basically evaluating all processes to make sure they reflect the new world you introduced. Besides that from a technology perspective an upgrade to vSphere with an offering for FT would probably make the business happy. SRM is also an option, but there are certain costs associated to it. Another thing with vSphere where you can definitely benefit from is thin provisioning. There's a lot actually that can and has been improved, the question is what are your customers needs?!

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[szelinsky]

Some of the things I have done to show cost effectiveness in the post adoption phases (in addition to what was previously mentioned) were hardware resource utilization improvements and management improvements. Now that the environment is solid, I am looking to improve things by pushing automation which can be realized in a VMware environment with products like Lifecycle Manager.

[Abhare]

Dear szelinsky ,

Could you please share with me what did you do to in terms of "hardware resource utilization improvements and management improvements"

Also how Lifecycle Manager can be used.

[szelinsky]

For hardware utilization, we have always tracked capacity usage on the physical server side. Utilization was always around 15% (mem, cpu, network). Now we have approx. 600 vms and host utilization is up to 45%...not where it should be but better than 15%. We have also reduced the footprint and network cabling drastically since we build our ESX hosts in blade chassis with virtual networking. There are many ways to present numbers to management to show the benefits...for example, total number of Ghz and memory on the floor supporting 600 VMs is far less than the total number of Ghz and memory on the floor supporting our 300 physical machines.

For management, one example is managing maintenance environments. Our production apps are required to be upgraded and tested in a maintenance environment prior to being upgraded in production. Rather than have physical maint environments sitting idle between upgrades, I have created a "maintenance on demand" environment where you spin the physical or virtual machine to a virtual maint environment for upgrade.

A problem we have here is the lack of retiring no-longer needed servers. I also want to automate environment builds and this is where Lifecycle Manager can help. I have looked at other products and am in the early POC phase, so I do not have much to add at this time.

[Abhare]

All,

Any suggestion on Virtual Appliance.

How mission critical applications can be benifited with Virtual Appliance.

I am at novice level in vmware, but i have to do some kind o improvement ..Any small improvement will be ok.

If it gives cost benefit to orgnisation, it will be highly appreciated.

Improvement is not confined to applications only.You can suggest any thing which can be done with production enviornment..

szelinsky :will it be possible for you to eloborate about utilisation improvement,actually i could not understand ur last post,Though it was helpful.

I hope u understood my requirement.You can suggest me any other thing also other than utilisation improvement(CPU,Memory)

Thanks in advance