Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications
W H I T E PA P E R / 4
While there are certainly specific challenges when it comes to
virtualizing business-critical applications, the most common
concerns are actually lingering misperceptions based on
earlier incarnations of virtualization from years ago. In addition,
virtualization is no longer just about consolidation and
cost-savings. Today, advanced VMware customers are using
virtualization to transform their IT infrastructure into a private
cloud. Applications really do run better on the VMware private
cloud, with much faster dev-test-provisioning cycles, better
service levels under unpredictable load, and simple, cost-
eective availability.
Join the many VMware customers on the next step of your
journey to transform your infrastructure into a dynamic private
cloud. Run your business-critical applications, including Exchange,
SQL, SAP, and Oracle, on VMware vSphere with breakthrough
performance and outstanding reliability. Build a flexible cloud
computing infrastructure that can deliver business-critical
applications as dynamic, cost-ecient, and reliable IT services.
VMware vSphere And VMware vCenter
VMware vSphere is the industry’s leading virtualization platform
for holistically managing large collections of infrastructure—
CPUs, storage, networking—as a seamless, flexible, and dynamic
operating environment. Unlike traditional operating systems that
manage an individual machine, VMware vSphere aggregates
the infrastructure of an entire datacenter to create a single
powerhouse with resources that can be allocated quickly and
dynamically to any application in need.
VMware vSphere provides revolutionary benefits, but with
a practical, non-disruptive evolutionary process for legacy
applications. Existing applications can be deployed on VMware
vSphere with no changes to the application or the OS they are
running on.
VMware vSphere delivers the performance required to run
business-critical applications in large-scale environments.
VMware vSphere provides 2-4 times the performance of the
previous generation platform (VMware Infrastructure 3) while
keeping virtualization overhead at a very limited at 2-10 percent.
With these performance numbers, VMware vSphere is able to
run even large, resource-intensive databases, and, in many cases,
enables applications to scale better on newer multicore servers.
VMware vSphere provides a set of application services that
enable applications to achieve unparalleled levels of availability,
security, and scalability. For example, with VMware vSphere, all
applications can be protected from downtime with VMware High
Availability (HA) and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), without the
complexity of conventional clustering. In addition, applications
can be scaled dynamically to meet changing loads with capabilities
such as Hot Add and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).
The VMware vCenter Product Family is the industry’s most
advanced virtualization management platform, which unlocks
the power of virtualization through proactive management and
centralized control of virtual infrastructure. For example, VMware
vCenter AppSpeed enables IT operations to monitor and ensure
the service levels of distributed multitier applications running
on VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 provides
developers and application owners on-demand, self-service
access to a library of application and development environments
to accelerate develop and test cycles.
With the powerful capabilities of VMware vSphere, the VMware
vCenter Product Family, and a growing ecosystem of over 500
technologies companies, the question has now shifted from
“can I virtualize my business-critical apps?” to “can I aord not
to?”. In this paper, we’ll explain why VMware vSphere is the best
platform for delivering business-critical applications. We will
address each of these six key considerations in order:
• Applicationperformance
• Consolidationandcostreduction
• Deliveringapplicationsasaserviceintheprivatecloud
• Acceleratingtheapplicationlifecycle
• GuaranteeingapplicationQualityofService
• ISVsupport
Application Performance
There are two key performance considerations to keep in mind
when virtualizing large resource-intensive applications. First,
each individual virtual machine must scale to support the
requirements of the application it is hosting. Second, many
applications can actually achieve higher performance on
vSphere than on physical servers, by scaling out on multiple
virtual machines to better leverage the capacity of large
multicore servers.
Virtual Machine Scalability
There is still a perception in the market that virtualization
introduces a performance constraint on larger applications,
especially IO-intensive applications such as databases and email
servers. This perception was created with early versions of the
VMware hypervisor, VMware ESX®, which did have scalability
limitations and material overhead. This, however, was multiple
product generations ago.