Facilitates business innovation through IT optimisation or a service-oriented architecture

Assesses virtualisation readiness and develops an in-depth business case

Provides detailed design planning and documentation

Includes implementation by qualified engineers and an integrated management platform, IBM Systems Directo

Getting more out of your x86 servers
It's no surprise that companies large and small are turning to virtualisation. Traditional server environments typically operate at only 5 to 15 percent of capacity. But organisations can increase their utilisation rates with x86 server virtualisation.1 What's more, they can achieve consolidation ratios ranging from 8:1 to 30:1 and dramatically lower their server provisioning and repurposing time.2

Creating a foundation for business innovation
Although these utilisation and consolidation results are important, virtualisation is taking on an even more important role today as an enabler of innovation. A successful virtualisation project can improve your organisation's ability to respond to new business needs by providing a foundation for a more dynamic IT environment. Server virtualisation can facilitate the alignment of IT to business objectives. It can play a major role in IT optimisation. It can act as a key building block in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment. It can even contribute to make your data centre more energy efficient. What's more, by helping to lower your total cost of ownership (TCO)-including costs associated with hardware purchases, maintenance and facilities-virtualisation can free up budgets for new initiatives.

While it's clear that x86 server virtualisation can deliver many benefits, there's a catch. To fully realise these benefits, organisations require expert planning, design and implementation for their virtualisation projects-and that's where IBM Server Optimisation and Integration Services - VMware server virtualisation comes in.

Building a virtualisation business case
IBM Server Optimisation and Integration Services - VMware server virtualisation starts with a solution framing step that can help answer a key question: What can x86 server virtualisation accomplish in your IT environment? IBM helps build a business case that projects your TCO and ROI. This, in turn, can help you to sell the virtualisation project within your organisation, especially to business executives who might be sceptical and therefore unwilling to fund it.

This solution framing step also looks at your business readiness and recommends strategies for supporting a shared service model. Working with your business and technology managers, an IBM IT architect documents your current business processes surrounding server purchasing, provisioning and management. This review details budget allocation and how budgets are currently assigned to projects and to the common infrastructure. The architect also documents your current operational and support model for change management, help desk and support staff roles, along with training needs and any internal service level agreements (SLAs).

Next, your IBM architect assesses your backend infrastructure components-for example, storage, network, backup, systems management, security and time synchronisation-to help ensure that they can support virtualisation. The architect also reviews and documents your current environment and makes recommendations for essential changes. Leveraging tools such as CiRBA's enterprise software, as necessary, the architect can gain a clear understanding of your environment and the various systems' configuration and utilisation. The architect also analyses business, infrastructure and workload constraints in order to accurately calculate the size of a potential virtualisation platform.
Finally, the IBM architect assesses the virtualisation host server to determine if it is large enough to deliver acceptable levels of services to all guests. The architect also performs a detailed hardware inventory and performance utilisation analysis for suitability within a virtualised environment.

Creating a detailed design for your project
To produce a virtual infrastructure design that meets your specific requirements, your IBM IT architect next performs a second step, plan and design, which produces a detailed design document that sets naming and security standards, defines the disk and network structure, and documents any required system tuning elements.

This document includes the following:

• Security and administration model
• Backup methodology
• Host physical and virtual disk layout, specifically file system structure and dedication of disks to guests, where applicable
• Virtual network topology structure and format, plus interconnection with the physical network
• VMware service console configuration
• VMware kernel device share factor configuration
• Host server hardware specification
• VMware VirtualCentre server configuration, including database and directory services integration
• Virtual machine distribution among hosts
• Processes and procedures for ongoing management
• Implementation tables and configuration settings

All of this information provides the level of detail an IBM engineer needs to perform the implementation of the host server and management environment.

Facilitating a successful implementation and skills transfer
Because successful implementations require qualified engineers, IBM provides an engineer trained in your specific virtualisation product. He or she implements your system as documented during the design step and transfers skills to the individual who will be responsible for the long-term operation of your environment. By staying actively involved throughout the implementation, your IT staff person can gain comprehensive skills that could otherwise only be learned through theoretical training.

IBM also offers the following optional custom services for post implementation support:

• Operational support
  • Monthly "health checks"
  • Thirty hours of engineering support per month
  • Optional four-hour emergency response service

• Full remote management services
  • New guest provisioning
  • Host hardware support
  • Virtualisation software support
  • Status monitoring
  • Performance and capacity management
  • Documentation
  • Security management
  • System software support
  • System backup and recovery
  • Infrastructure resilience and operational processes

With experience gained in managing more than 206,000 servers worldwide, IBM has the in-depth technical skills necessary to plan, design and implement x86 server virtualisation in heterogeneous environments across servers, storage and network and systems management functions. IBM also provides architecture, processes and standards, an integrated server management platform-IBM Systems Director-and extensive business and technology transformation capabilities. And, thanks to IBM's global delivery organisation with its common models, methodologies and tools, you can take advantage of IBM Server Optimisation and Integration Services - VMware server virtualisation from virtually anywhere in the world. In fact, IBM has 208 VMware-certified professionals in 28 countries, including 72 in Europe alone. IBM is VMware's largest systems integration partner and one of its largest original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.