Virtualisation
Are you looking to virtualise your network in part or in full?

Are you trying to understand what can and can't be virtualised?

Do you want to have your network assessed to see how virtualisation could consolidate your servers and improve availability?

Do you have problems with VM sprawl?

Do you have visibility of how applications are performing within the virtual machine?

Does your VMware implementation need a health check?

ICT Worldwide are an Auckland Based VMware and Microsoft Partner, with a strong focus on virtualising networks to make them more flexible and highly available.

ICT Worldwide are focused on how information technology can be used to benefit the business - essentially to have IT recognised as a Business Enabler, not a cost centre. Virtualisation is a great way to help achieve that. We combine the best of different technology solutions to assist organisations in achieving their requirements of a highly available, adaptive network.

We can help you understand the transition to a virtualised network and what the benefits are both for the business and for the IT Department.

Cost effectiveness is important, and we will give you the information you require to make an informed decision on what virtualisation can do for your business.

The virtualisation market has been dominated by VMware who have led the way with their ESX vSphere software, but now Microsoft's Hyper-V, which is included in their Windows Server 2008 Operating System, is getting alot of traction as well. ICT Worldwide are a partner of both vendors and have experience with deploying these virtualisation solutions so we can take an independent approach in discussing these options with you.

What is Virtualisation?

One of the growth areas of business technology recently has been in server virtualisation. In simple terms, server virtualisation creates a virtual server, so instead of the server hardware being tied to only one operating system and a set of applications at a time it can run multiple virtual servers on the same hardware at the same time. This could mean you are running Windows Server 2008, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Server, and Linux all on the same box, or it could be all the same operating system but instead of separate hardware servers for different applications, they could all run on the same piece of hardware, just in virtualised environments, this allows you to consolidate your servers onto less hardware.

  • Virtualisation presents virtualised hardware to operating systems thereby rendering the OS and applications non-dependent on the underlying hardware
  • The OS 'sees' the virtualised drivers as actual hardware. The drivers presented appear to the OS as a generic PC regardless of whatever brand it is running on.
  • This seemingly small change has incredible benefits.
  • Virtualisation is NOT emulation.
  • Virtualisation is not just for large organisations - the benefits equally apply for SMB's

This allows greater adaptability for an organisation as new applications can be tested and launched more rapidly. With the growth in use of virtualisation organisations can reduce their server numbers by running multiple servers on the same hardware. While virtualisation is not suited to all situations in reality there are only a small number of applications that don't sit well in a virtual environment. most businesses can implement this at least in part, which can reduce your hardware usage and save power. The diagram below illustrates the difference between a traditional 'single server, single application' setup and a virtualised server environment.

In fact virtualisation technology now has the capacity to switch off some servers when they are not being utilised and to direct the users to another server, bringing the downed server back on when the demand increases - this reduces the power consumption of hardware at times when it is not needed. ICT Worldwide are well equipped to discuss your requirements, assist with virtualisation assessments, design and deployment, as well as advice on planning of projects and third party tools to assist with virtualisation tools to assist with virtualisation management, off site replication and backups of virtual machines.

Virtualisation of Citrix:

Contrary to what many people think, ICT Worldwide have found that Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server can be successfully deployed on virtualised servers - we have done it with VMware VI3 and vSphere, and this speeds up the process of deploying Citrix environments and there is no loss of performance.

Virtualisation of Microsoft Exchange:

Exchange 2007 is a major jump from previous versions, requiring 64 bit servers and to provide high availability is much more complex than with 2003. However, there is a way to avoid many of the challenges, and the hardware overhead - virtualise it. We have had great success with the virtrualisation of Exchange 2007 - if you are looking to go down this path then contact ICT Worldwide.

For more information on Virtualisation solutions and how VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V can aid your business, talk to ICT Worldwide on +64 9 358 3340 or email sales@ictworldwide.com