Why Virtualization » Virtualization Facts

10 Things to know about Virtualization – Item 2

Robert E. Boggs — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:40:34 +0000

We found this old list on Techrepulic by Rick Vanover and thought we would go through and freshen it up and add our perspective because technology moves quick and things change sometimes day to day. We are now on item #2.

Rick Says

#2: Storage and networking will be your biggest pain points

Planning a server virtualization implementation of any scale will require a lot of planning in the areas of storage and networking. In a server virtualization strategy, the migration from local storage to shared centralized storage takes adequate sizing and planning. Further, administrators will be challenged to rethink the provisioning of virtual servers.

From our experience Rick is dead on. We have done hundreds of deployments in Education, Corporate, Wndows, Novell and Mac environments and going to a centralized storage solution allows our customers better performance, productivity and manageability but it makes the administrator rethink how they support their end users. The planning portion of this process is vital and collaborative as it allows the Administrator to fully comprehend the reach of virtualization and the indirect and the direct savings while we customize the best solution.

10 Things to know about Virtualization – Item 1

Robert E. Boggs — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:28:45 +0000

We found this old list on Techrepulic by Rick Vanover and thought we would go through and freshen it up and add our perspective because technology moves quick and things change sometimes day to day.

Rick says

#1: Virtualization is more than just VMware
Sure VMWare is the current leader, but it has company in the server virtualization space as well as desktop virtualization. The newest player is Citrix XenServer. The XenServer Enterprise platform is quickly gaining features and management offerings rivaling those of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), based on ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5. The Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor is also going to be a player when Windows Server 2008 is released. Hyper-V will provide a similar offering to VI3 from the Microsoft perspective. The Hyper-V virtualization platform on Windows will also offer some desktop virtualization options that supplement the server virtualization platform.

We have personally implemented Citrix and can testify it’s not all VMWare all the time. A third player he mentions above with the Hyper-V solution is Microsoft and is quickly moving up in the market. What is the difference? Which one should your company, school or municipality use?

Give us a call and we can help you navigate which solution will work best for your situation. You have to know where you came from, what your goals are for the future and how each one will impact your IT situation before we can make a good determination. We don’t just sell the software, we implement it. Experience matters.

Virtualization, a definition

Robert E. Boggs — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:49:27 +0000

Whether you are work in education, for a municipality or are in corporate america, virtualization is something you have heard about. There is a lot of information being produced by all the different players in the virtualization market. My goal is to demystify virtualization and the benefits it can bring to an organization. There are a lot of hyped up promises and tech-talk and I think virtualization is too important to the groups who can most benefit from it to wrap it in double-speak.

First off, we need to define the term virtualization so we all have common ground. It can be somewhat slippery as different groups use it to describe their particular set of services.

The best definition I have found is this, from this white paper on Virtualization in Education from IBM:

“Simply put, virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications or end users interact with those resources. As a practical matter, when you get a Google map on your cell phone or when you let your PC automatically shop for the lowest price, you are using virtualization. The concept of virtualization is very broad and can be applied to devices, servers, operating systems, applications and even networks.”

It’s the last sentence that makes it the versatile and somewhat confusing concept to understand. If it can be applied to so many different pieces and parts in the technology process how can it work for your particular organization?