Читать книгу Mastering VMware vSphere 6 - Marshall Nick - Страница 15

Much has been said and written about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for virtualization projects involving VMware virtualization solutions. Rather than rehashing that material here, I’ll instead focus, briefly, on why an organization should choose VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform.

Online TCO Calculator

VMware offers a web-based TCO calculator that helps you calculate the TCO and ROI for a virtualization project using VMware virtualization solutions. This calculator is available online at www.vmware.com/go/calculator.

You’ve already read about the various features that VMware vSphere offers. To help you understand how these features can benefit your organization, I’ll apply them to the fictional XYZ Corporation. I’ll walk you through several scenarios and show how vSphere helps in these scenarios:

Scenario 1 XYZ Corporation’s IT team has been asked by senior management to rapidly provision six new servers to support a new business initiative. In the past, this meant ordering hardware, waiting on the hardware to arrive, racking and cabling the equipment once it arrived, installing the operating system and patching it with the latest updates, and then installing the application. The time frame for all these steps ranged anywhere from a few days to a few months and was typically a couple of weeks. Now, with VMware vSphere in place, the IT team can use vCenter Server’s templates functionality to build a VM, install the operating system, and apply the latest updates, and then rapidly clone – or copy – this VM to create additional VMs. Now their provisioning time is down to hours, likely even minutes. Chapter 10 discusses this functionality in detail.

Scenario 2 Empowered by the IT team’s ability to quickly respond to the needs of this new business initiative, XYZ Corporation is moving ahead with deploying updated versions of a line-of-business application. However, the business leaders are a bit concerned about upgrading the current version. Using the snapshot functionality present in ESXi and vCenter Server, the IT team can take a “point-in-time picture” of the VM so that if something goes wrong during the upgrade, it’s a simple rollback to the snapshot for recovery. Chapter 9, “Creating and Managing Virtual Machines,” discusses snapshots.

Scenario 3 XYZ Corporation is impressed with the IT team and vSphere’s functionality and is now interested in expanding its use of virtualization. To do so, however, a hardware upgrade is needed on the servers currently running ESXi. The business is worried about the downtime that will be necessary to perform the hardware upgrades. The IT team uses vMotion to move VMs off one host at a time, upgrading each host in turn without incurring any downtime to the company’s end users. Chapter 12 discusses vMotion in more depth.

Scenario 4 After the great success it has had virtualizing its infrastructure with vSphere, XYZ Corporation now finds itself in need of a new, larger shared storage array. vSphere’s support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS gives XYZ room to choose the most cost-effective storage solution available, and the IT team uses Storage vMotion to migrate the VMs without any downtime. Chapter 12 discusses Storage vMotion.

These scenarios begin to provide some idea of the benefits that organizations see when virtualizing with an enterprise-class virtualization solution like VMware vSphere.

What Do I Virtualize with VMware vSphere?

Virtualization, by its very nature, means that you are going to take multiple operating systems – such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Novell NetWare – and run them on a single physical server. While VMware vSphere offers broad support for virtualizing a wide range of operating systems, it would be almost impossible for us to discuss how virtualization impacts all the different versions of all the operating systems that vSphere supports.

Because the majority of organizations that adopt vSphere are primarily virtualizing Microsoft Windows, that operating system will receive the majority of attention when it comes to describing procedures that must occur within a virtualized operating system. You will see coverage of tasks for a virtualized installation of Linux as well, but the majority of the coverage will be for Microsoft Windows.

If you are primarily virtualizing something other than Microsoft Windows, VMware provides more in-depth information on all the operating systems it supports and how vSphere interacts with those operating systems on its website at www.vmware.com.