Why Do I have So Many Boxes?

Do you find yourself looking at your machine room and wondering “Why are there so many machines in there?” Often it’s just a question of having to run legacy applications or applications that are just too time consuming and expensive to consolidate onto other machines. One possible solution to this is the use of Virtualization.

Virtualization is the hot topic at the moment, everyone is talking about it, but what virtualization technology should you use and when? Microsoft has some helpful information to enable you to make informed decisions about this technology.

In the Virtualization in a Nutshell webcast and the IPD guide for Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology, we will explain each virtualization solution that Microsoft offers, from our server virtualization, presentation virtualization, storage virtualization through to our application virtualization solution, we will explain what they are and when to use them. In the Data centre by using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper V, the IT Department can reduce the total number of physical servers running both Windows and Linux operating systems. Once the decision is made to virtualize servers what next? The one thing you can’t just do is virtualize it all at will, Selecting the Right Candidates for Virtualization will help you decide on what servers and workloads can be virtualized by using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool. Having used MAP you are now at the point where you can start to make decisions on what to virtualize. The first step is to pilot the process on not critical servers, Virtualizing Test and Development Environments for a Quick Return on Investment takes you through virtualizing servers that are easy candidates and can provide a quick result in terms of server reduction and improved service.  With the knowledge and experience of how to virtualize servers we are at a stage where we can start to expand out and virtualization  more servers and make virtualization a service provided by IT. Consolidation and Rapid Provisioning looks at how to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to achieve this final objective.