By Michael K. Campbell
A recent Ziff Davis study points out that 90% of companies today are talking about server consolidation and virtualization, while over 50% are currently implementing server consolidation. In other words, virtualization is taking the world by storm – and if you haven’t started evaluating its benefits, then it’s time to do so. Likewise, if you have started evaluating the benefits or have even started the consolidation process, then you need to be apprised of the types of options available. The webcast Virtual Server and HP: Better Together helps capture some of the expediency behind the move to virtualization being considered by many companies today, and also, obviously, showcases some of the ways that HP can provide additional benefits for customers looking to use Microsoft’s Virtual Server.
Starting off with an overview of Microsoft’s current virtualization offerings, this webcast points out that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is currently Microsoft’s consolidation solution – at least until the imminent release of Hyper-V when Windows Server 2008 goes live.
Of course, even once Hyper-V goes live, Virtual Server will still remain in service (and supported until 2014), and will remain an option for consolidation for many companies. As you would expect, this webcast makes sure to provide some slides of Virtual Server in action – helping to explain some of its key benefits as well.
One thing I really liked about this webcast was how the presenters took a few minutes to point out some of the changes and features that have been added in recent versions to help meet customer demand, such as VSS integration.
Following the introduction, however, is where this webcast starts to get really interesting. The first thing it addresses is a special ‘sizing’ application that HP has produced to help companies easily target, or plan (i.e. size) the kinds of hardware they’ll need in order to consolidate workloads with virtualization.
As you would expect, the sizing application has lots of cool features that let you specify the kinds of hardware you’ll be using (including things like specifying what kind of disk you’ll be using, how many processors, how much RAM, and so on), along with what kinds of workloads you’ll be virtualizing. You can then set parameters for how aggressive or conservative you want your workloads consolidated, along with a lot of other options.
TIP: The website tells you how to gain easy access to the sizing application on HP's website.
Of course, since the sizing application is provided by HP, it also provides you the option to specify which HP servers you’d like to host your consolidation efforts on, and will ultimately even give you a parts manifest once you fine tune the solution to your needs. Frankly, that’s not a bad option if you’re getting serious about consolidation – as it can give you a quick insight into how much it would cost to virtualize your datacenter.
Following the overview of the sizing tool, this webcast then takes a look at some of the benefits of HP’s line of ProLiant servers and showcases some of the ways they’re well suited for not only virtualization, but consolidation as well. Initially I was pretty skeptical of this section of the webcast, but as it progressed, I had to agree that HP does provide some great features that will benefit companies looking to consolidate their servers – things that I really hadn’t thought about too much since my own experience with virtualization typically lies in the ‘digital’ realm instead of in the realm of laying cables and provisioning hardware.
Where I really got interested though was when HP started talking about management options – which actually took up close to half of this webcast. The reason I found this interesting though is because I personally think that Virtual Server’s user interface is currently just plain unacceptable. System Center Virtual Machine Manager will make that problem go away, but HP also provides a lot of different options as well.
The webcast also provided a good overview of some of the ways that HP’s Insight Manager has been designed to work with virtualization. The webcast also went into decent detail on a bevy of other pertinant topics, such as automatic discovery and policy enforcement, P2V and V2V (as well as P2P) migration options, and even an overview of how HP’s solutions that build upon Virtual Server can give companies the abililty to ‘fast-move’ virtual machines in order to ensure high availability (in similar manner to what VMware’s VMotion offers – but at a fraction of the cost and complexity/difficulty). But, if you’re interested in those kinds of important details, then you’ll need to drop your own skepticism and go watch Virtual Server and HP: Better Together for yourself.