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.