Transform your Business with Virtualization

Improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications through virtualization. Start by eliminating the old “one server, one application” model and run multiple virtual machines on each physical machine. Free your IT admins from spending so much time managing servers rather than innovating. About 70% of a typical IT budget in a non-virtualized datacenter goes towards just maintaining the existing infrastructure, with little left for innovation.

An automated datacenter built on a production-proven virtualization platform lets you respond to market dynamics faster and more efficiently than ever before. Virtualization servers delivers resources, applications—even servers—when and where they’re needed. Our customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines with virtualization software.

• Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
• Let your Mac run Windows creating a virtual PC environment for all your Windows applications.
• Reduce capital costs by increasing energy efficiency and requiring less hardware while increasing your server to admin ratio
• Ensure your enterprise applications perform with the highest availability and performance
• Build up business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions and deliver high availability throughout the datacenter
• Improve enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflicts

What is Virtualization?

Today’s x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application, leaving most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that one physical computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. Our partner’s technology is production-proven, used by more than 500,000 customers, including 100% of the Fortune 100.

How Does Virtualization Work?

The virtualization platforms are built on a business-ready architecture. Use software to transform or “virtualize” the hardware resources of an x86-based computer—including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller—to create a fully functional virtual machine that can run its own operating system and applications just like a “real” computer. Each virtual machine contains a complete system, eliminating potential conflicts. Virtualization works by inserting a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently. Multiple operating systems run concurrently on a single physical computer and share hardware resources with each other. By encapsulating an entire machine, including CPU, memory, operating system, and network devices, a virtual machine is completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications, and device drivers. You can safely run several operating systems and applications at the same time on a single computer, with each having access to the resources it needs when it needs them.

Build your Datacenter on a Flexible Architecture

Virtualizing a single physical computer is just the beginning. You can build an entire virtual infrastructure, scaling across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices, a proven virtualization platform used as the foundation for building private and public clouds. You don’t need to assign servers, storage, or network bandwidth permanently to each application. Instead, your hardware resources are dynamically allocated when and where they’re needed within your private cloud. Your highest priority applications always have the necessary resources without wasting money on excess hardware only used at peak times. Connect this private cloud to a public cloud to create a hybrid cloud, giving your business the flexibility, availability and scalability it needs to thrive.

Manage your Resources with the Lowest TCO

It’s not just virtualization that’s important. You need the management tools to run those machines and the ability to run the wide selection of applications and infrastructure services your business depends on. Increase service availability while eliminating error-prone manual tasks. IT operations are more efficient and effective with virtualization. Your staff will handle double or triple the number of servers, giving users access to the services they need while retaining centralized control. Deliver built-in availability, security, and performance across the board, from the desktop to the datacenter.

Why Your Company Should Virtualize

Virtualizing your IT infrastructure lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of your existing assets. Around the world, companies of every size benefit from virtualization. Thousands of organizations—including all of the Fortune 100—use virtualization solutions. See how virtualizing 100% of your IT infrastructure will benefit your organization.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

• Get more out of your existing resources: Pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model with server consolidation.
• Reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure and improving your server to admin ratio: Fewer servers and related IT hardware means reduced real estate and reduced power and cooling requirements. Better management tools let you improve your server to admin ratio so personnel requirements are reduced as well.
• Increase availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity: Securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service. Eliminate planned downtime and recover immediately from unplanned issues.
• Gain operational flexibility: Respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.
• Improve desktop manageability and security: Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC.
• Learn More about the Power of Virtualization

Put the power of virtualization to work for your organization today by downloading free virtualization products, or evaluating one of our enterprise software solutions. You can also learn more about how your organization can achieve rapid IT optimization with a virtual infrastructure, as well as benchmarking guides for measuring the performance improvements gained through the use of virtualization technology.

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie, software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC).

An operating system can’t tell the difference between a virtual machine and a physical machine, nor can applications or other computers on a network. Even the virtual machine thinks it is a “real” computer. Nevertheless, a virtual machine is composed entirely of software and contains no hardware components whatsoever. As a result, virtual machines offer a number of distinct advantages over physical hardware.

Virtual Machines Benefits

In general, virtual machines possess four key characteristics that benefit the user:

• Compatibility: Virtual machines are compatible with all standard x86 computers
• Isolation: Virtual machines are isolated from each other as if physically separated
• Encapsulation: Virtual machines encapsulate a complete computing environment
• Hardware independence: Virtual machines run independently of underlying hardware compatibility

Just like a physical computer, a virtual machine hosts its own guest operating system and applications, and has all the components found in a physical computer (motherboard, VGA card, network card controller, etc). As a result, virtual machines are completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications and device drivers, so you can use a virtual machine to run all the same software that you would run on a physical x86 computer.

Isolation

While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualized system.

Encapsulation

A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or “encapsulates” a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an operating system and all its applications, inside a software package. Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).

Hardware Independence

Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely different from the physical components that are present on the underlying hardware. Virtual machines on the same physical server can even run different kinds of operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).

When coupled with the properties of encapsulation and compatibility, hardware independence gives you the freedom to move a virtual machine from one type of x86 computer to another without making any changes to the device drivers, operating system, or applications. Hardware independence also means that you can run a heterogeneous mixture of operating systems and applications on a single physical computer.

Use Virtual Machines as the Building Blocks of your Virtual Infrastructure

Virtual machines are a fundamental building block of a much larger solution: the virtual infrastructure. While a virtual machine represents the hardware resources of an entire computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the interconnected hardware resources of an entire IT infrastructure—including computers, network devices and shared storage resources. Organizations of all sizes use virtualization solutions to build virtual server and desktop infrastructures that improve the availability, security and manageability of mission-critical applications.

Reduce Costs with a Virtual Infrastructure

Lower your capital and operational costs and improve operational efficiency and flexibility. Go beyond server consolidation and deploy a standard virtualization platform to automate your entire IT infrastructure. VMware customers have harnessed the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity, provide better service levels, and streamline IT processes. We coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure–we call it the virtual infrastructure.

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?

A virtual infrastructure lets you share your physical resources of multiple machines across your entire infrastructure. A virtual machine lets you share the resources of a single physical computer across multiple virtual machines for maximum efficiency. Resources are shared across multiple virtual machines and applications. Your business needs are the driving force behind dynamically mapping the physical resources of your infrastructure to applications—even as those needs evolve and change. Aggregate your x86 servers along with network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources that can be utilized by the applications when and where they’re needed. This resource optimization drives greater flexibility in the organization and results in lower capital and operational costs.

A virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:

• Bare-metal hypervisors to enable full virtualization of each x86 computer.
• Virtual infrastructure services such as resource management and consolidated backup to optimize available resources among virtual machines
• Automation solutions that provide special capabilities to optimize a particular IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery.
• Decouple your software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure so you can aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources. Then dynamically deliver those resources, securely and reliably, to applications as needed. This pioneering approach lets our customers use building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers to build a self-optimizing datacenter and deliver high levels of utilization, availability, automation and flexibility.

Bring Virtual Infrastructure Benefits to your Datacenter

Gain the benefits of virtualization in production-scale IT environments by building your virtual infrastructure with the leading virtualization platform. Virtualization Infrastructure unifies discrete hardware resources to create a shared dynamic platform, while delivering built–in availability, security and scalability to applications. It supports a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure. We have designed our solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system so you have a broad platform choice. Our solutions provide a key integration point for hardware and infrastructure management vendors and partners to deliver differentiated value that can be applied uniformly across all application and operating system environments.

Get More from your Existing Hardware

Our customers report dramatic results when they adopt our virtual infrastructure solutions, including:

• 60-80% utilization rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized PCs)
• Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualized
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime