Transforming administration-intensive physical data centers into optimized, cost-effective virtualized infrastructures is not something most organizations do every day. By drawing on best practices culled from successful customer engagements around the world, Dell Infrastructure Consulting Services can help organizations maximize IT resources, simplify server management, and sustain value across the overall IT infrastructure.
Achieving Balance-Sheet Business Value with Virtualized Server Solutions
Dell Infrastructure consultIng servIces
IT infrastructures have become central to enterprise
operations in virtually every industry—which is why
data center flexibility, simplicity, and costs have sur-
faced as top executive concerns. To help enterprises
remain competitive and support these priorities, IT orga-
nizations must address a variety of challenges. Executives
are demanding improved control of infrastructure manage-
ment costs, including power and cooling. Therefore, IT
organizations are under pressure to reduce the volume of
hardware required to support their organizations and drive
cost savings. In addition, IT infrastructures must meet
regulatory requirements for high availability and business
continuity and comply with strict service-level agreements
(SLAs) with their constituents.
Under pressure to reduce costs by transforming their
operations, IT organizations must also increase infrastructure
flexibility to respond quickly to enterprise demands. System
administration efforts, and therefore costs, must be reduced
despite accelerating requirements for change management.
IT organizations must drive efficient use of system resources
to avoid buying new equipment when current assets are
underutilized. At the same time, these organizations must
design systems that can protect uptime and availability in
the face of isolated component failure or broad disaster.
In the past few years, virtualization has become a
preferred approach to consolidating data centers and
increasing operating efficiency. Virtualized infrastructures
are designed to increase reliability and minimize down-
time for end users by reducing physical points of failure
and enabling immediate failover during a system outage.
Reducing the number of physical systems also reduces
trouble tickets and alerts, helping lower system admin-
istration expenses. In addition, enterprises can benefit
from increased resiliency, which helps reduce preparation
and recovery time when faced with a major disaster such
as a hurricane or tornado.
Virtualization can help reduce costs in several important
ways. The consolidation of physical servers helps enterprises
save on data center space as well as power and cooling (see
Figure 1). Virtualization can also help simplify operations—
allowing administrators to spend fewer hours on mainte-
nance than would be required for physical systems.
Understanding virtualization services Once an organization decides to proceed with a virtualiza-
tion project, administrators face a pivotal decision:
Should the organization implement virtualization on its
own, or bring in experts to help?
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | August 200764 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, August 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
The issue is not that enterprises lack the
resources or knowledge to implement virtual-
ization technologies. Instead, working with a
consulting organization experienced in design-
ing and deploying virtualized environments
enables enterprises to benefit from expert guid-
ance when designing an infrastructure that
best meets their particular needs. Consultants
with deep knowledge and broad expertise can
help enterprises complete projects quickly and
cost-effectively while transferring knowledge
and sharing best practices.
Dell Services—whose virtualization con-
sultants are VMware® Certified Professionals—
takes a solutions-oriented approach to help
organizations achieve tangible results quickly
and cost-effectively. After an in-depth assess-
ment of an organization’s goals and current
environment, Dell Services experts can design
and implement a comprehensive, high-
availability virtualization solution, including
integration of the storage environment and
tuning of the backup and recovery systems.
As part of the virtualization process, the Dell
Services team also optimizes x86 server
architecture and enables the systems
management capabilities required for a robust
IT infrastructure.
Enhancing the work of the Dell Services
virtualization team, the Dell Virtualization
Global Practice Group leverages best practices
the world over—including virtualization exper-
tise honed from hundreds of customer engage-
ments around the globe. Dell Services also
uses and continuously enhances its intellec-
tual property documentation and methodolo-
gies to apply relevant, state-of-the-art best
practices to specific organizational needs (see
sidebar in this article).
Delivering broad expertiseDell Services offers six key areas of virtualiza-
tion expertise.
Physical-to-virtual migration. Converting a
set of physical servers to virtual machines
(VMs) that run on a reduced number of physical
servers can help simplify administrative efforts.
Consolidation also helps lower acquisition
costs, enabling organizations to buy fewer
physical servers during the next system refresh
than they would otherwise. Furthermore, con-
solidation through virtualization can help
reduce transition risks and optimize use of sys-
tems resources.
High availability. Addressing fault toler-
ance and resiliency in the server infrastructure
can help ensure that SLAs are met. High avail-
ability is commonly achieved by avoiding
single points of failure—for example, using
multiple network interface cards or host bus
adapters, or implementing clusters running
the Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® operating
systems. VMs also enable fast recovery from
hardware failure, which helps avoid unplanned
downtime and enhances service levels.
Backup and recovery. Optimizing backup
and recovery processes in a virtualized server
environment can significantly reduce the
number of backup agents in the IT infrastruc-
ture. This approach also eases the risk of end-
user disruption or system administration
problems and helps reduce network traffic by
backing up data directly from the storage area
network (SAN). The Dell Services team offers
knowledge transfer to help optimize backup
and recovery processes in a virtualized server
environment.
Configuration management and monitor-ing. Dell Services provides IT departments
with the tools they need to track which VMs
run on which physical servers. By monitoring
resource utilization, IT administrators can
decide whether to balance workloads by
moving VMs from one server to another. Dell
65www.dell.com/powersolutions
ApplicationOS
Microsoft Exchangeserver
ApplicationOS
Print server
ApplicationOS
Customer relationshipmanagement server
ApplicationOS
Database server
ApplicationOS
Web server
ApplicationOS
File server
VM
VMware ESX server
VM VM VM
VM
VMware ESX server
VM
VM
VMware ESX server
VM VM
Before virtualization after virtualization
servers 800 50
storage Direct attach storage Tiered SAN and network attached storage
network 2,500 cables and ports 250 cables and ports
facilities 180 racks and 300 power whips 10 racks and 20 power whips
Figure 1. Virtualization enables server consolidation, flexibility, and availability
Dell Services intellectual property for virtualizationThe intellectual property used by Dell Services virtualization consultants is continuously updated to help meet specific organizational needs. This com-pendious resource includes:
• More than 600 pages of in-depth documentation
• Best practices gathered from around the world
• Dell Virtualization Reference Architecture and collaboration with Dell Solutions Engineering
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, August 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Services also can help organizations estab-
lish processes and tools to monitor system
health and dynamically reconfigure physical
and virtual server assets. This approach helps
speed system resource provisioning for new
or increased workloads.
Development and test environments. VMs allow organizations to quickly establish
a production-like environment for testing
configuration changes and software patches—
sometimes in minutes, compared with the
hours or days it can take to reconfigure an
all-physical test and development environ-
ment. By leveraging virtualization, Dell
Services helps reduce the risk of disrupting
software development and test processes.
Virtualization upgrades. Making the
transition from VMware Virtual Infrastructure
2 to Virtual Infrastructure 3 enables organiza-
tions to realize enhanced benefits. In the
process, Dell Services can identify additional
workloads to be virtualized. By drawing on
its in-depth experience in diverse customer
engagements around the world, Dell Services
can help organizations reduce the risks
inherent in this transition.
Taking virtualization from concept to realityWithin each of its six areas of virtualization
expertise, Dell Services offers four types of
virtualization consulting services: work-
shops, assessments, designs, and imple-
mentations. Reaching beyond the workshop
Dell Infrastructure consultIng servIces
nlinewww.dell.com/powersolutions
QUICK LINKS
Dell Infrastructure Consulting Services: www.dell.com/ics
Dell Virtualization Services: www.dell.com/virtualizationservices
Dell virtualization solutions: www.dell.com/virtualization
DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | August 200766
Dell Services experts can help enterprises deploy virtualization solutions quickly and cost-effectively.
and assessment services offered by many
consulting organizations, Dell Services pro-
vides design and implementation services
that enable enterprises to take virtualization
all the way from concept to reality.
Workshops. Half-day virtualization work-
shops help organizations understand the
potential of virtualization technology and
how virtualization can apply to their specific
problems and needs. Consulting whiteboard
sessions include a broad discussion of
enterprise requirements and technology
capabilities, as well as a discussion of how
virtualization technologies can address spe-
cific organizational needs and priorities. At
the end of these sessions, Dell Services pro-
vides a high-level architecture and plan to
help organizations get started.
Technology workshops complement con-
sulting whiteboard sessions by providing an
interactive, hands-on exploration of virtualiza-
tion technology as driven by enterprise needs
and priorities. In these workshops, Dell Services
experts help organizations understand how they
can use VMware technology to run their work-
loads with VMs and consolidate their physical
servers. Organizations can also increase their
understanding through the hands-on use of
VMware VirtualCenter, VMotion™, VMware
High Availability (VMware HA), and Distributed
Resource Scheduler software.
Assessments. In a virtualization assess-
ment, Dell Services helps organizations make
informed decisions about whether and how to
proceed with virtualization using VMware tech-
nology. Dell Services helps identify which work-
loads and physical servers are most suitable
for virtualization based on resource utilization
as well as total cost of ownership (TCO).
At the conclusion of an assessment proj-
ect, Dell Services creates a report that covers
not only infrastructure evaluation, but also
organizational recommendations and TCO.
This report provides a rough cost estimation
for implementing the recommended archi-
tecture, including the costs of hardware,
software, outside services, and internal
IT staff effort. If an organization is consider-
ing a server refresh—with or without
virtualization—Dell Services provides a
comparison with a TCO estimate.
Designs. During design projects, Dell
Services helps organizations lay the path to
success by specifying detailed hardware and
software configurations for the future virtual-
ized server infrastructure, as well as providing
a detailed implementation plan. This plan can
enhance the efficiency of the implementation
phase while helping lower TCO by reducing the
number of physical servers and software
licenses required during a server refresh.
Design projects also help organizations specify
how to establish configuration management
and monitoring to enable flexible ongoing man-
agement of virtualized servers.
Implementations. In implementation
engagements, Dell Services helps organizations
capture the value of virtualization. Typical tasks
include hardware and software installation,
configuration, quality assurance, migration of
VMs on physical servers, migration of data,
promotion of data to production environments
(making it available to end users), and transfer
of knowledge to the organization’s IT staff.
Typical deliverables for implementation
projects include diagrams and build docu-
ments that describe how the systems were
configured so that the organization and Dell
support teams can refer back to the initial
production state. Dell also provides a knowl-
edge transfer checklist, which includes best-
practices tips tailored to the organization’s
specific environment.
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, August 2007. Copyright © 2007 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.