OGL Computer

OGL have recently announced their appointment as Enterprise Partner on the VIP Program with VMware, the world leaders in virtualisation technology.   

Our virtualisation solutions are built around VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure, allowing us to deliver the most cutting-edge in virtualisation technology.

ESX Server lies at the heart of VMWare's Infrastructure and installs as a bare metal operating system onto your virtualisation host server. Once loaded, ESX Server allows multiple virtual machines to run, with the ESX Server sharing out CPU, Memory, Network and Disk resources. The ESX host server hardware is specified to have enough hardware resources available to handle the number and type of virtual machines being run on it.

A virtual machine is hardware independent, allowing the handful of files which make up a virtual machine to be portable between ESX Servers running on different hardware platforms.

• Each ESX host Server can support multiple network adaptors and the ESX Server level will automatically balance network load of virtual machines across these network adaptors.
• Can isolate the networks of running virtual machines through the use of configurable virtual networks switched within the ESX console with additional support for VLANs.

Depending on the type of servers to be virtualised, some impressive results can be achieved, with eight physical servers virtualised to a single ESX host with a hot standby not unusual. Clearly this depends on the applications and load of the existing physical servers. As part of our Virtualisation solution we will assess your current server's resource usage and investigate whether and how this server could be migrated to a virtualised environment.

• Ability to consolidate your existing physical servers into virtual machines on a fewer number of physical ESX host Servers resulting in greatly reduce costs.
• Run multiple ESX host Servers with the virtual machine files being stored on a SAN (Storage Attached Network) to which the ESX hosts have shared access.
• Each ESX host is able to run any of the virtual machines allowing the load of your virtual machines to be spread over multiple ESX hosts.

Using VMWare's VMotion technology, it is possible to move a running virtual machine from one ESX host to another ESX host. This is done in real time and involves no server outage of the running virtual machine.

In conjunction with VMotion, the VMWare DRS service (Dynamic Resources Scheduling) can be configured to automatically move running virtual machines between ESX hosts. This automatically balances processing load across your virtualised server farm, again there is no downtime for the virtual machines as they are moved between ESX hosts.

To ensure your business critical servers perform in a virtualised environment, it is possible to specify resource priorities to an individual or group of virtual machines. This allows the ESX host server to dynamically assign resources such as CPU and memory.

If you would like to learn more about our server virtualisation with VMware, call our team of experts today on 01299 873 873.