Server Management Consulting and Support

VMware is a pioneer of virtualization, which initially transformed conventional datacenter architecture and later became the critical enabler of cloud computing. VMware offers virtualization solutions for organizations of any size and VMware's infrastructure technology is deployed by all Fortune 500 companies. Flagship products include VMware Workstation for desktop virtualization, ESXi for server virtualization, vSphere for cloud computing virtualization, vRealize Suite for managing hybrid clouds, vSAN for software defined storage, Site Recovery Manager for automated disaster recovery, and NSX for network virtualization.

Progent can provide the support of a certified VMware VCDX consultant to help you design, configure, manage and troubleshoot a vSphere-based virtualization solution for on-premises datacenters, cloud environments, or hybrid deployments that span local and cloud-based resources. Progent can provide advanced expertise deploying and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware's NSX network virtualization platform for disaster recovery. Progent offers expert understanding of VMware vCloud Director (vCD), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) and vCloud Suite used for managing private and hybrid cloud environments that feature high availability, fault tolerance, and application continuity. Progent's Cisco CCIE consultants can help you plan and implement a resilient physical network infrastructure to support your cloud and hybrid-cloud solutions powered by VMware vSphere.

vSphere Hypervisor
vSphere Hypervisor is a free entry-level virtualization product based on VMware vSphere ESXi that allows you to turn existing servers into virtual machines or create VMs from scratch. The bare-metal vSphere Hypervisor, a rebranded and improved version of VMware Free ESXi, requires no underlying host OS and has a miniscule install footprint compared to other hypervisors such as Windows Server Core or Citrix XenServer. The vSphere Hypervisor supports thin provisioning, which permits you to allocate storage resources beyond your available physical storage. This over subscription of capacity to VMs allows vSphere Hypervisor to utilize page sharing and compression mechanisms to optimize the utilization of memory resources. Upgrading from the free vSphere Hypervisor to a more advanced version of vSphere is easy, simply requiring the addition of a license file.

VMware's vSphere Cloud Virtualization Platform
VMware ESXi (formerly VMware ESX) is the hypervisor component of vSphere that allows you to turn a physical computer into a virtual server capable of hosting virtual machines (VMs) based on various operating systems such as Windows Server and Linux. VMware vSphere (formerly branded VMware Infrastructure) is a comprehensive virtualization platform for creating and managing enterprise-class cloud computing environments. The vSphere platform delivers comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability, and operational automation capabilities. A key component of VMware vSphere called VMware vMotion increases system uptime through the ability to migrate a running virtual server from one physical server to another with zero downtime. This avoids planned downtime for common operations such as maintenance, moves, or disaster avoidance.

With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, the live migration capabilities of vMotion were expanded with the ability to move live virtual machines (VMs) between physical vSphere hosts without shared storage. This makes it economical for small organizations to benefit from non-disruptive migration without the high cost of installing and managing Storage Area Networks (SANs) and is an effective way to eliminate application downtime for scheduled maintenance. This is similar to the Shared Nothing Live Migration feature introduced in Microsoft's Hyper-V 3.0. (Refer to Windows Server 2012 R2 consulting services.) With current versions of vSphere, the Cross-Cloud vMotion feature allows live migration of workloads between VMware-based clouds.

VMware vCenter Server
For larger installations of virtual servers, powerful and unified management of the entire virtualized environment can be achieved with VMware vCenter Server technology, providing tools to control all facets 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.

VMware vCenter Server, formerly VMware VirtualCenter, intelligently optimizes resources, ensures high availability for all applications in virtual machines, and provides virtualized distributed services such as VMware DRS, VMware HA, and VMware vMotion. VMware vCenter Server lets you automate routine management procedures through task scheduling and alerting. This allows you to improve IT responsiveness to business needs and prioritize actions needing the most urgent attention.

With VMware vCenter Server 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.

VMware Site Recovery Manager and NSX
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and VMware vCenter servers running at primary (protected) and recovery sites can co-ordinate to ensure that recovery VMs are quickly activated when primary VMs are shut down. The virtual machines at the recovery site use the data replicated from the primary site to continue delivery of identical services. This provides a powerful disaster recovery (DR) solution to avoid unplanned outages, VMware SRM also permits non-intrusive execution of planned procedures like disaster avoidance, migrating a datacenter to a different site, testing updates, validating a DR plan to prove regulatory or contractual compliance, and failback after a site shutdown. If a protected site and recovery site are within metro distances and have a high-bandwidth, low-latency connection, the use of array-based storage and synchronous replication can deliver zero data loss (RPO) and rapid recovery time (RTO).

To span network and security policies across multiple sites you can use an external replication/synchronization technology like vRealize Orchestrator or the Cross-vCenter (Cross-VC) feature of VMware NSX. Cross VC NSX streamlines the deployment of Universal Logical Switches, Universal Distributed Logical Router, and Universal Distributed Firewall to create a single unified logical network (L2, L3, DFW) across the primary and recovery site. This allows seamless failover and recovery without the need to re-create the network on the recovery site or manually map and remap IP addresses.

For details on VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware NSX and to find out how Progent can help you create a disaster recovery solution for your VMware environment, see VMware Site Recovery Manager and NSX consulting.

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 a current copy of all the virtual machine guest files, in case the virtual machine host fails you can choose to boot those backup images as running machines so that your network stays productive while restoring 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.

How Progent Can Help You with VMware Virtualization Solutions
Progent's certified VMware consultants can help you to analyze the benefits of the latest VMware technology for your organization, perform pilot installations to verify operation with your workloads, optimize your hybrid cloud infrastructure for VMware vSphere, help your company to migrate from legacy virtualization solutions to modern ones, show your IT staff how to streamline and automate VMware management, provide effective consulting assistance for improving the security of your virtualized network, and deliver ongoing consulting and technical support via cost-effective online help desk services from Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC).

Progent can provide expertise for VMware vCloud Director, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator and vCloud Suite for managing private and hybrid cloud environments that feature high availability, fault tolerance, and application continuity. Progent has expertise with VMware vSAN storage and VMware's NSX network virtualization platform. Progent also offers advanced consulting for key network technologies such as TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, LACP, OSPF, and BGP. Progent can also help you integrate VMweare technology with third-party clustered storage solutions by providing services such as NetApp SAN storage integration.

Progent's VCDX-certified VMware expert has worked with datacenter architects, network engineers and department directors of some of the world's biggest technology companies, large financial institutions, and government agencies to design high-availability solutions for hybrid cloud environments. Experience with large-scale projects includes working in deployments scaling to more than 1500 ESXi hosts and more than 45,000 VMs.

Contact Progent for Expert Help with VMware Technology
To find out more about how Progent can help you with VMware technology, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.