Tuesday, April 27, 2010

AOKNetworking's Newest Team Member

Curtis Hill
Network Engineer

Speciality: SonicWALL, Cisco, Windows System, Linux & Blackberry Enterprise

VMware vCenter AppSpeed

Manage the Performance of Virtualized Multi-Tier Applications

Guarantee performance SLAs to the business and perform "Assured Migrations" as you measure performance both before and after virtualizing an application. VMware vCenter AppSpeed inspects traffic flowing over the vSwitch, discovers and maps the environment, monitors performance against SLAs and enables root cause analysis.

Ensure Performance Levels for Virtualized Multi-Tier Applications
Analyze the performance of applications in your environment and find ways to improve it. AppSpeed measures the latency experienced by the application end users and correlates that latency to the different tiers of the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure. Gain powerful capabilities to discover and map each tier of the infrastructure, identify application performance bottlenecks and enable root cause analysis. Model how applications would perform in virtualized environments and eliminate uncertainty about virtualizing business-critical applications.

Get a Real-Time View of Actual End-User Application Performance
Discover the relationship between VMs and applications shortly after installation. Group VMs into logical units with dependency mapping and gain an end-to-end view of application performance. Out-of-the-box views and dashboards identify the worst performing applications, applications with declining performance and applications experiencing high network error rates.

Identify trends and gain insight into root cause analysis through AppSpeed's timeseries data.
Create performance thresholds based on automatically calculated performance baselines.

Dramatically Reduce Troubleshooting Time and Finger Pointing
Determine whether network, infrastructure or application issues are at the root of performance concerns, then use a comprehensive set of tools for triaging and troubleshooting. View latency from the broad applications level all the way to the finest level of detail (transaction or database query). Break latency issues down to contributing components (infrastructure, network and application). Work with your networking and application owner counterparts to quickly resolve performance issues and eliminate endless triage, blame, and finger pointing.

100% Non-Intrusive Performance Management
Unlike other performance management tools on the market, AppSpeed does not require agents, code insertion into applications or the creation of synthetic transactions. AppSpeed is able to monitor application latency non-intrusively by inspecting packets flowing over a host's vSwitches.

Reduce Barriers to Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications
Eliminate performance concerns about virtualizing enterprise applications and realize dramatic OPEX and CAPEX savings. Show concerned application owners application performance measurements before and after migration to a virtualized environment and easily demonstrate that performance is not negatively impacted by virtualization.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Virtualizing Enterprise Applications

Upgrade to the Best Platform for Business-Critical Applications

Give Your Applications a More Dynamic Infrastructure
Application architectures are rapidly evolving towards highly distributed, loosely coupled applications. Multitier applications, now the norm, will become more even important with the move to SOA, Web 2.0 applications and other emerging application frameworks.

The conventional x86 computing model, with applications tightly coupled to physical servers, is too static and fragmented to efficiently support these complex and dynamic applications. In fact, in these environments more than 70% of IT budgets are used just to manage existing applications and IT services. Less than 30% is allocated to innovation and competitive advantage.




Deliver Applications Dynamically in a Cost-Efficient Private Cloud
As the first cloud operating system, VMware vSphere transforms IT infrastructures into a private cloud delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Free existing and future application loads from the constraints of a static, dedicated infrastructure, by utilizing a collection of internal clouds that federate on-demand to external clouds.

Exceed the Performance of Applications on Physical Servers
More than 95% of applications, including large databases, enterprise business suites, and email, will match and even exceed the performance achieved on physical servers when run on VMware vSphere. Each virtual machine can scale to 8 vCPU, 256 GB of memory and support IO intensive applications. Your applications achieve far greater scalability per physical host by scaling out on multiple virtual machines-often the only way to leverage the capacity of the latest multicore servers.

Minimize Infrastructure Costs
Achieve 5X to 10X consolidation ratios for demanding applications such as Exchange and SAP. Eliminate the need to provision dedicated testing, staging, training, and DR servers. In production, give applications exactly the capacity they need, when they need it and eliminate the need to overprovision.

Accelerate Application Delivery
Create pre-configured vApps that can be provisioned on demand, test multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently and automate release cycles with VMware vCenter Stage Manager. Deploy standard, pre-configured application stacks at the click of a button, ensuring consistency across production applications and minimizing manual configuration overhead and configuration errors.

Guarantee Application Quality of Service
Ensure end-user QoS by automatically providing the right levels of application availability and scalability with the vSphere Application Services. Dynamically dial up or down application availability and scalability levels as business requirements evolve so you can meet QoS requirements in the most cost-effective way.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Business Continuity

Improve Business Continuity with Virtualization

While disasters and unplanned downtime get the big headlines, planned downtime for hardware maintenance and backups is the cause of most service interruptions. VMware's server, desktop and application virtualization products let you eliminate planned downtime, ensure data protection, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery. Virtualize your datacenter and make it easier to deploy:

Data protection, including non-disruptive automated backup and restore processes

High availability through reduced planned and unplanned downtime

Protect your Business-Critical IT Infrastructure

Get Full Data Protection for your IT Infrastructure
Simplify backup and recovery of your data and systems with virtualization. Easily recover important data within your recovery time objectives using your existing backup tools and methodologies. Benefit from a simpler data protection plan, encompassing all systems and applications and leveraging the benefits of a virtualized datacenter.

Eliminate Planned and Unplanned Downtime

Make sure your applications have the highest level of availability with built-in service-levels that are easier and more cost effective than traditional solutions. The live migration of virtual machines eliminates the need for planned downtime, allowing IT to perform maintenance on physical servers anytime, without user or service disruption.

Build Reliable and Efficient Disaster Recovery Plans

Eliminate the cost and unpredictability of traditional disaster recovery solutions by taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of a 100% virtualized datacenter. Utilize this foundation to build highly effective disaster recovery plans and test your plan in a non-disruptive manner-eliminating the issue of failure due to hardware differences between the primary and backup datacenters.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Virtualization for Small & Medium Businesses

Enabling Always On IT for SMBs

Small businesses face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. Small businesses often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a "do more with less" mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.

VMware vSphere for small business is the most cost effective way to enable Always On IT - the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations optimized for small and midsized businesses


Always On IT

Virtualization technology simplifies IT so that companies can more effectively utilize their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster. The virtual infrastructure approach to IT management creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, enabling administrators to allocate these resources quickly to the highest priority applications and the business needs that require them the most.

With virtualization, hardware management is completely separated from software management, and hardware equipment can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking power to be reallocated on the fly to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them - while administrators gain the ability to efficiently manage and optimize resources to serve the needs of the business.

VMware equips SMBs with technology solutions that allow them to cost effectively optimize the use of their existing IT assets and resources as well as protect the systems, data, and applications that run the business, ensuring Always On IT. With analysts predicting the adoption of virtualization among SMBs to double in the next 24 months, these benefits are making this compelling technology a mainstream mandate for SMBs.


Benefits

Slash capital costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy - enabling SMBs to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent.

Enhance staff productivity. VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. They provide IT professionals with the freedom to be released from menial tasks, enabling them to take a more strategic role in the enterprise.

Improve business continuity. VMware solutions offer complete data protection, truly continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites. VMware virtualization helps SMBs protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance, eliminating the need for maintenance windows.

Improve business responsiveness through improved efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness. Managing a virtual infrastructure allows IT professionals to quickly connect and manage resources to meet ever-changing business needs. VMware virtualization can result in faster provisioning of new applications in minutes, not weeks, and can accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes.

Improve application quality and deployment. With VMware virtualization, SMBs can test more applications by optimizing pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.

Strengthen security. VMware virtualization enables automated patch management of server hosts and virtual machines and an integrated firewall that maintains security policies across the mobile, flexible environment and decreases operational costs of managing them.