May 2009: Solutions Magazine article - Guy De Smet
Do not underestimate the project side
"A virtualized infrastructure including servers and storage system increases the use of resources, provides a better distribution of performance while improving the strength and the return on investment of a project."
For Guy De Smet, Managing Director, DS Improve, the growing use of x86 servers running applications demanding in data still leads to a proliferation of servers and a significant increase in dedicated assets largely under-utilized and demanding more resources to manage, to supply and to maintain. "Virtualization is now a need to optimize data center management and reduce costs."
VMware Enterprise Partner, DS Improve believes that there is still much to be done at the server level, even if this type of virtualization is the most common.
"The principle is interesting to share hardware resources of a machine in order to optimize the performance instead of installing a single operating system and, often, one application or pole per machine."
The vast majority of enterprise servers are using in the best case 10 to 15% of material resources of the platform! According to the necessary resources, it is often possible to combine up to five servers on a single machine, without loss of peformance.
"But a study should be made case by case depending on the services and applications concerned ..."
Based on this observation, virtualization can provide significant gains in terms of cost by the simple aggregation of multiple servers on a single platform, it is said, may fear the worst in case of hardware failure ... A view that denies the Managing Director of DS Improve: "fewer machines does not mean less availability, since server virtualization will lead to duplication of services at lower cost!" It will be possible to crate solutions with so-called high availability more easily and economically.
You can also free yourself from "sleeping" machines by sharing several virtualized servers on two machines and making them work on only one in case of failure of the second.
A virtualized architecture allows to deploy more quickly and simply new servers, temporary or permanent (virtual server as backup of a down physical server, the pre-production server, test server, increase in need ...) This makes it possible to provide effective responses in crisis situations where one has to minimize as much as possible any service interruption.
