Server Management Consulting and Support

Virtual servers were originally popularized by VMware, who remain the market leader. To stave off competitive threats with recent virtual technology offerings from Microsoft, VMware has recently taken the radical step of releasing a new version of its powerful GSX Server product for no software licensing cost.

VMware Server
VMware Server is a free virtualization product that runs on Linux and Windows 2000/2003 Servers. VMware Server enables companies to partition a physical server into multiple virtual machines and to start experiencing the benefits of virtualization with minimal investment. VMware Server is a robust yet easy to use product for users new to server virtualization technology and is based on VMware’s field-proven technology. VMware Server is ideal for developers, departments, workgroups, and branch offices who want to:

• Streamline software development and testing
• Evaluate software in ready-to-run virtual machines
• Re-host legacy operating systems
• Simplify server provisioning
• Leverage pre-built, ready-to-run virtual appliances

VMware Server runs on any standard x86 hardware and supports 64-bit guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris. You can manage VMware Server with VMware VirtualCenter, which simplifies the tasks of provisioning, monitoring, and managing infrastructure by providing a central management console. Support for two-processor Virtual SMP enables a single virtual server to span multiple physical processors. VMware captures the entire state of a virtual machine and can roll back at any time. To protect your investment of time, VMware Server offers an easy upgrade path to data center versions of VMware such as ESX Server and VMware Infrastructure.

VMware ESX Server
VMware’s flagship ESX Server product allows you to create the foundation for building a dynamic, self-optimizing data center. ESX Server installs on the “bare metal” and allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run in virtual machines that share physical resources. ESX Server abstracts processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines, giving you maximum hardware utilization and flexibility. VMware ESX Server allows enterprise data center implement large-scale solutions for:

• Production server consolidation
• Business continuity
• Enterprise software development and testing
• Enterprise desktop solutions

VMware Infrastructure
VMware Infrastructure is a suite of next-generation infrastructure virtualization software based on VMware ESX Server. VMware Infrastructure virtualizes servers, storage, and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources. The VMware Infrastructure suite delivers comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability, and operational automation capabilities. A revolutionary component of VMware Infrastructure, called VMware VMotion, provides ultra-high availability through the ability to migrate a running virtual server from one physical server to a different physical server with zero downtime for the virtual server. This powerful feature allows IT personal to perform hardware maintenance or upgrades on physical servers without impacting production servers running line-of-business applications.

VMware VirtualCenter
For larger installations of virtual infrastructure, powerful and unified management of multiple VMware servers can be achieved with VirtualCenter technology, providing tools to manage all aspects of server deployment and configuration. There is a graphing system to easily view CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization trends of all servers over extended periods.

VirtualCenter intelligently optimizes resources, ensures high availability to all applications in virtual machines, and makes your IT environment more responsive with virtualization-based distributed services such as VMware DRS, VMware HA, and VMware VMotion. VirtualCenter offers operational automation through task scheduling and alerting. This allows you to improve IT responsiveness to business needs and prioritize actions needing the most urgent attention.

With VirtualCenter you can automate routine management tasks with task scheduling and alerting. You can also monitor performance and utilization of physical servers and the virtual machines they are running with detailed reporting of CPU, memory, and I/O performance. For enhanced security that still provides management flexibility, you can limit access to authorized personnel using tiers of customizable roles, fine-grained permissions, and integration with Microsoft Active Directory.

Using Microsoft Data Protection Manager with VMWare
For users of VMWare, an effective way to reduce disaster recovery time drastically is to build a Data Protection Manager (DPM) server with enough CPU and RAM resources to create a system that allows you to recover from a failed virtual machine host server. Because the DPM server has an exact, up-to-date replica of all the virtual machine guest files, in case the virtual machine host fails you can choose to boot those replica images as running machines so that your network stays productive while restore the original failed virtual machine host server. This means you could be back on line in minutes with all your virtual machine guests even with a complete failure of the original virtual machine host. Find out more about Progent's consulting support for Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

Progent Offers Expert Help with VMware Virtual Server Technology
To find out how Progent's VMware consultants can help you with VMware Virtual Server technology, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or send email to server-management-help@progent.com.