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Server Consolidation
VMware Overview
Server consolidation is a logical and compelling strategy for
reducing costs and improving reliability but it is not without
pitfalls. The less components that are used, the less likely one
is to fail - it’s just common sense, but also benefits include fewer
support licences, less data-centre real estate requirements, less
operational staff and support, less hardware redundancy, fewer
upgrades (expected). On the down side implementing software
upgrades and undertaking maintenance affects all applications
on that server, and most importantly, more eggs in fewer baskets
is not necessarily better.
Applications tend to be written and deployed on a dedicated
server. Often the OS version or ‘flavour’ needs to be different for
each application. Sometimes it’s even patch incompatibility that
prevents applications being hosted on the same machine.
Each child OS is provided with all the (virtual) resources it would
expect and VMware keeps the virtual disks on the host system.
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VMware™ is a powerful way to consolidate hardware without
application re-writes. Virtual Machine software (WMware) is a
software only solution that allows multiple instances of various
operating systems to be deployed on the same server hardware.
VMware is installed on a base (host) OS and then ‘guest’ OS
instances of the same or different types are installed.
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With these kinds of constraints, server consolidation is very
difficult to achieve in a traditional way.
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Users may even want to have multiple versions of the same
application running on different servers to provide “live” or
“production” services independent of “test” or “development”
environments.
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An example of the traditional and VMware enabled server
infrastructures is shown in the diagrams above.
The possibilities presented by VMware are exciting and offer
cost saving and a genuine opportunity to improve reliability
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of the system as a whole. However, while the diagram on the
left showing the traditional infrastructure has clearly included
resilience, the VMware model does not.
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RSF-1’s tight integration with VMWare now allows for these virtual
environments to be transparently switched between servers
improving the resilience of VMware. This can allow even those
applications that can’t normally be clustered to be clustered in
this new model, meaning almost all Windows™ applications i.e.
applications need not be ‘cluster aware’.
The diagram above shows a typical RSF-1™ clustered
configuration of VMware, with applications split to make the most
of the hardware capacity available.
RSF-1 cluster software offers an easy to install and administer,
yet powerful cluster configuration and management framework
that allows customers to deploy effective High-Availability
solutions in hours rather than weeks. Combined with application
monitoring agents, RSF-1 provides automatic application and
service migration between servers in response to server and / or
application failure, maximising service availability to the client.
In the event of a failure, all applications will be switched-over to
the standby node. While all the diagrams shown only depict a
pair of servers running VMware, RSF-1 supports clusters of many
more machines to facilitate the configuration and management of
a true network application cluster.
Features and Benefits
High-Availability, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
– Maximum service availability!
Symmetric AND Asymmetric architectures covered.
RSF-1’s “Total” solution – Includes:
• Cluster Software
• Application agents
• Full Installation (typically 2 days)
• Training course for up to 4 administrators
• 1 year support at either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum levels.
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Software Partner
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sales@High-Availability.Com
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