As government agencies tighten their budgets, virtualization is more heavily relied upon to increase their capabilities without increasing their expenditures. VMware continues to raise the bar with their innovative solutions to help IT staff do more with less.
VMware vSphere with Operations Manager (vSOM) has been introduced to ultimately double IT savings. Virtual infrastructure itself reduces overall cost associated with maintaining a datacenter – smaller footprint, lower power consumption, decreased need for cooling, etc. Pairing the hypervisor with a management solution, however, can double IT savings by improving application performance and business continuity, providing operational insight, and optimizing capacity. August Schell highlights the four importances of vSOM.
4 Reasons why you need to shift your focus to VMware vSphere with Operations Management
1. Reduce downtime of applications, diagnosis and problem resolution time.
The ability to remediate immediate problems saves so much time. By tracking workload, anomalies, and faults, one can determine whether system faults have occurred with a single click. The workload section illustrates how hard the system is working; the anomalies section illustrates how normal the system is behaving; and the faults section illustrates availability and configuration issues for the subject. The three sections together provide an organic, real-time health monitor.
2. Plan for future IT needs to avoid future problems.
vSOM tracks stress, time remaining, and capacity remaining to provide an illustration of how the system is functioning as a whole. Time remaining illustrates percent of time buffer window remaining; capacity remaining illustrates the percentage of remaining VMs; stress illustrates the degree of habitually high workloads.
3. Improve VMware capacity utilization and consolidation ratios
A low density leads to a large amount of accumulated waste. By tracking VM density and waste, one can increase overall efficiency by increasing density through higher consolidation ratios and reclaiming wasted capacity.
4. Amplify vSphere value by doubling the IT savings
By combining all of these tools that come with vSOM, one could:
- Reduce downtime of applications by 36%
- Reduce diagnosis and problem resolution by 26%
- Improve capacity utilization by 40%
- Improve consolidation ratios by 37%
Case studies and customer success stories include Marshall University (oldest public higher education institution in WV, EGIS Nyrt (Eastern European pharmaceutical manufacturer), and QIC (one of Australia’s largest institutional investment managers). Though each of these case studies encompasses different nuances, they each indicate one shared goal: improve their data center uptime – one of the many practical features of vSOM.
Other key features and components of vSOM Basic Edition are vSphere Hypervisors as the virtualization platform with virtual symmetric multiprocessing, VMware virtual hardware, and vSphere Machine File System (VMFS). Thin provisioning, High Availability, and Fault Tolerance are also available on Basic Edition. Upgrading to Enterprise or Enterprise Plus includes many other features that can ultimately reduce overhead over a prolonged timespan.
Post by Lorenzo Magnaye at August Schell Enterprises