Hello. My name is Dan Chu. I'm Senior Director of Product atVM Ware. Today I'm going to talk to you about enterprise class virtualization.In our last white board, we talked about what is virtualization. Now we'regoing to talk about what it means to actually not just to virtualize a singleserver environment or just a couple but actually deploy virtualization acrossthe entire enterprise. Today we have over 20,000 enterprise customers who haveadopted virtualization broadly and 90 percent of them are actually running inproduction their business critical applications and workloads in virtualizedenvironments. So we're going to talk about what enables that and whatadditional benefits companies and CIOs are getting from deployingvirtualization across their data centers.
So specifically, we're going to talk about three majorconcepts and three major requirements for enterprise class virtualization. Oneis scalability and performance. What we're talking about is deployingvirtualization across hundreds or even thousands of virtualized server environments-notjust one machine but a large number.
Now, across each of these environments you have manyapplications running side by side. And as opposed to that one initialenvironment that you might have been running for development or non-productionworkloads, these are your databases, these are your e-commerce applications,your web servers, your domain controllers and you want them to run at highperformance and with high scalability.
Now, at an entry level oftentimes people use virtualizationsolutions that run on another operating system. So virtualization software inthat case is simply an application that gets installed and it's very easy toget it up and running. On the other hand, for enterprise class virtualizationwhere performance and scalability and fidelity and uptime are critical,customers overwhelmingly have standardized on bare metal architectures or hypervisors that run natively on the underlying hardware.
The benefits of these are manifold. There isn't a singlepoint of failure or the security vulnerabilities of an underlying OS. And justas importantly, there is highly optimized performance because thevirtualization layer really runs directly on the hardware and there isn't theinefficiency of the intermediating operating system.
The second one is availability. If you're a CIO and you'vedeployed virtualization across your entire data center you want to get thebenefits of having even better uptime than you had before in your more chaoticphysical environment. You want to have your servers be able to allow you tohave a much stronger infrastructure and there are a couple of key ways thatcustomers are achieving that today.
One is being able to V-motion or live migrate theirapplications. So, in essence, if you have a server that you need to upgrade oryou need to do maintenance on, you can actually take the applications and havethem instantly move over to a neighboring machine without any down time. Thatbusiness application, that web server moves over without any interruption tothe actual customer's users using it and you can move them right back over whenyou're done upgrading or replacing that machine.
Also, you want distributed availability, which is actuallyif you have a server that goes down you want your virtualization layer to havethe capability to automatically restart those applications on neighboringmachines where there's capacity and be able to automatically fail over thosebusiness critical applications.
A final significant benefit that customers are getting is management.And again, in moving from the server sprawl of their past physicalenvironments, when they move to these virtualized environments stretchingacross hundreds or even thousands of servers, they want to be able to manage,provision, update and monitor these servers even better than they could in thepast traditional physical environments. And so you want a holistic managementcapability across all these servers and across all these virtualizedenvironments.
And even more than that, you want the capability to havedistributed resource management. In this case, if you have a specificapplication-and all applications never run at a constant level-if you have atrading payroll application, for instance, and it runs at a low levelutilization 99 percent of the time but every two weeks when that payroll goesout it spikes up to full utilization. And you want that capability for thatserver to be able to automatically take that spiking workload and move it onover to a separate machine that has a lot more capacity and to be able toautomatically do that and preserve the service levels you have to your endusers. And again, it's another key feature that people are getting in terms ofenterprise class virtualization.
So overall, customers are finding huge value tovirtualization, not just at a small scale but a whole pool of differentialvalue they're getting from implementing virtualization across their datacenters, across their enterprise.
