One of the biggest challenges facing IT departments today is to keep your work environment. This is due to the need to maintain IT infrastructure able to meet the current demand for services and applications, and also ensure, that in the critical situations of the company, is able to resume normal activities quickly. And here is where it appears the big problem .

Much of IT departments are working on their physical limit, logical and economical . Your budget is very small and grows on average 1% a year, while managing the complexity grows at an exponential rate. IT has been viewed as a cost center real and not as an investment, as I have observed in most of the companies for which I have passed.

With this reality, IT professionals have to juggle to maintain a functional structure. For colleagues working in a similar reality, recommend special attention to this topic Virtualization .

Instead of speculating, Virtualization is not an expensive process compared to its benefits . Believing that depending on the scenario, Virtualization can be more expensive than many traditional designs. To give you an idea, today over 70% of the IT budget is spent just to keep the system environment, while less than 30% of the budget is invested in innovation advantage, differentiation and competitiveness. This means that almost any IT investment is dedicated simply to “put out the fire” emergency solve problems and very little is spent on solving the problem.

I followed a very common reality in the daily lives of large companies where the IT department is so overwhelmed that you can not measure the time to think again. In several of them, we see two completely different scenarios. A before and after Virtualization / cloud computing. In the first case, what we see is a bottleneck with reality drastic and resources to the limit. In the second, a scene of tranquility, guaranteed safe management and scalability.

Therefore, consider the proposal of Virtualization and discover what you can do for your department and therefore, for your company.

Within this reasoning, we have two maxims. The first: “Rethinking IT. The second: “Reinventing the business.”

The big challenge for organizations is precisely this: rethink. What to do to transform technical consultants?

Increase efficiency and security

To the extent that the structure increases, so does the complexity of managing the environment. It is common to see data center dedicated to a single application. This is because the best practices for each service request that has a dedicated server. Obviously the metric is still valid, because without doubt this is the best option to avoid conflicts between applications, performance, etc.. Also, environments such as this are becoming increasingly detrimental as the processing capacity and memory are increasingly underutilized . On average, only 15% of the processing power is consumed by a server application, that is, over 80% of processing power and memory is actually no use.

Can you imagine the situation? We, first, we have virtually unused servers, while others need more resources, and ever lighter applications, the use of hardware is more powerful.

Another point that needs careful consideration is the safety of the environment. Imagine a database server with disk problem? What will be the difficulty of your company today? The time that your business needs to quote, purchase, receive, change and configure the environment to drop the item. During all this time, what was the problem?

Many companies are based in the cities / regions far from major centers and therefore may not think this hypothesis.

With Virtualization it does not, because we left the traditional scenario where we have a lot of servers, each hosting its own operating system and applications, and we go to a more modern and efficient.

In the image below, we can see the process of migrating the physical environment, where multiple servers to a virtual environment, where we have fewer physical servers or virtual servers hosting.

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By working with this technology and we have underutilized servers for different applications / services that are assigned to the same physical hardware, sharing CPU resources, memory, disk and network. This makes the average usage of this equipment can reach 85%. Moreover, fewer physical servers means less spending on supplies, memories, processors, means less purchasing power and cooling, and therefore fewer people to manage the structure.

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At this point you should ask, but what about security? If now I have multiple servers running simultaneously on a single physical server I’m at the mercy of this server? What if equipment fails?

New thinking is not only the technology but how to implement this technology in the best way possible. Today VMware , the global leader in Virtualization and cloud computing, working with a technology cluster, enabling and ensuring high availability of their servers. Basically, if you have two or more servers that work together in the event of failure of any equipment, VMware identifies this fault and automatically restores all its services on another host. This is automatic, without IT staff intervention.

At runtime, the physical failure is simulated to test the high availability and security of the environment in the future, the response time is fairly quick. On average, each server can be restarted with 10 seconds, 30 seconds or up to 2 minutes between each server. In some scenarios, it is possible that the operating environment will restart in about 5 minutes.

Be ready quickly new services

In a virtualized environment, the availability of new services becomes a quick and easy task, since resources are managed by the Virtualization tool and not tied to a single physical machine. This way you can hire a virtual server resources only and therefore avoids waste. On the other hand, if demand is rapidly increasing daily can increase the amount of memory allocated to this server. This same reasoning applies to the records and processing.

Remember that you are limited by the amount of hardware present in the cluster, you can only increase the memory to a virtual server if this report is available in its physical environment. This ends underutilized servers, as it begins to manage their environment intelligently and dynamically, ensuring greater stability

Integrating resources through the cloud

Cloud computing is a reality, and there is no cloud without Virtualization. VMware provides a tool called vCloud with it is possible to have a private cloud using its virtual structure, all managed with a single tool.

Reinventing the Business

After rethinking, now is the time to change, now is the time to reap the rewards of having an optimized IT organization, we see that when we do a project structured high availability, security, capacity growth and technology everything becomes much easier in the benefits we can mention the following:

Respond quickly to expand its business

When working in a virtualized environment, you have to think in a professional manner to meet all your needs, you can meet the demand for new services, this is possible with VMware because it offers a new server configured in a few clicks, in five minutes and has offered a new server ready to use. Today becomes crucial, since the start time a new project is decreasing.

Increase focus on strategic activities

With the controlled environment, management is simple and it becomes easier to focus on the business. That’s because you get almost all the information and operational work is to have a thought of IT in business, and that is to transform a technical consultant. Therefore, a team will be fully focused on technology and strategic decisions, and not another team as firefighters, are dedicated to put out the fires caused.

Aligning the IT departments decision making

Virtualization allows IT staff have the metric reporting and analysis. With these reports have in their hands a professional tool that will lead to a fairly simple language and understand the reality of their environment. Often, this information supports a negotiation with management and, therefore, the approval of the budget for the purchase of new equipment.

Well folks, that’s all. I tried not to write too much, but it’s hard to say something as important in less lines, I promise that future articles will discuss in detail a little more about VMware and how it works.