Virtualization

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer.

How Does Virtualization Work?

Use Virtualization 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.

Transform your Business with Virtualization

Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications in your organization. Internal resources are underutilized under the old “one server, one application” model and IT admins spend too much time managing servers rather than innovating.

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 and 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

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. Customers have harnessed the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity, provide better service levels, and streamline IT processes.

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.

Virtual Infrastructure Benefits

Gain the benefits of virtualization in production-scale IT environments by building your virtual infrastructure with the leading virtualization platforms. 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