Dell vStart: Simple, fast, smart path to virtual infrastructure

MANILA, Philippines - Since it took off just a few years ago, virtualization has proven itself beneficial to enterprises.

Besides helping simplify physical infrastructure and lower TCO, it can speed up service delivery, improve IT and enterprise agility, boost infrastructure scalability, resilience and reliability, enhance security and outage recovery, and lay a foundation for cloud computing.

Not surprisingly, the adoption rate for virtualization is robust: IDC research shows the number of virtual servers is growing rapidly, with growth far outpacing that for physical servers.

About 25–30 percent of all servers have been or are being virtualized worldwide and IDC expects the figure to grow to nearly 50 percent by next year.

Every enterprise embarking on virtualization wants to be able to realize and maximize its benefits quickly. However, building virtual infrastructure can be a complex and lengthy process.

The build process starts with the design of the system architecture, followed by an examination of the use cases to be supported by the virtual environment.

The selection and proof-of-concept testing of virtualization software to meet these use cases, as well as hosting hardware, come next.

Once software and hardware have been procured, the enterprise needs to migrate its existing servers to the new virtualized environment.

This key step involves configuring virtual servers, consolidating workloads from multiple physical servers, integrating the virtual servers with physical ones, adding memory and I/O if necessary, and so on, with tests interspersed between the various tasks and post-migration.

Once migration is complete, the enterprise then needs to decide how it wants to administer the new environment: are the management tools for the virtualization product sufficient or is there a need for more general system management tools?

Setbacks of DIY approach

It is possible for enterprises to build virtual infrastructure on their own without outside help, provided their IT organizations have decent-sized budgets and the specific skills related to virtualization.

However, where budget dollars and the necessary skills are in short supply, as in many enterprises, achieving virtual capability can be not just complex and lengthy but painful as well, especially for those with small IT teams and remote offices that lack any on-site IT support.

While there is always the option of using consultants and systems integrators to supplement in-house staff, the approach can be expensive and time-consuming.

Enterprises that choose to build virtual infrastructure on their own often run into unforeseen obstacles in the design, test, procurement, integration and migration phases.

More often than not, these obstacles cause what is known as virtualization stall, where projects take longer or cost more than planned.

In addition, many in-house teams end up focused on the wrong things, honing their skills on building infrastructure rather than running applications that generate value for their customers.

Dell vStart

To help enterprises fast-track their way to a virtualized environment and accelerate time to benefit, Dell has innovated a ready-to-run solution that enables them to avoid the problems commonly faced when building virtual infrastructure.

Called Dell vStart, the solution is pre-built, pre-configured, pre-tested and pre-assembled and contains all of the server, storage, networking, and management extensions needed to go virtual.

Dell vStart is offered in three configurations — vStart 50, vStart 100 and vStart 200 — that support up to 50, 100 and 200 virtual machines, respectively.

The configurations are further distinguished by their storage capacity and their support for either the VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

“Dell vStart is a great way to acquire virtual infrastructure without the complexity, resources and time associated with the on-site assembly approach. We have seen the challenges that can stand between the business and an effective virtualization solution, and we have leveraged our deep expertise and experience in virtualization to create a simpler path for our customers,” said Christopher Papa, country manager of Dell Philippines.

“It’s pretty much plug-and-play. Customers simply pick the Dell vStart configuration best suited for their workload needs. And with deployment services included with every vStart, customers can have their virtualization environment up and running in days rather than months,” Papa said.

As for day-to-day administration of the virtual infrastructure post-implementation, the included software makes it easy to manage hardware infrastructure easily and without additional consoles or interfaces to learn or manage.

Further benefit comes from having a single point of accountability. Scalability is almost effortless — as their needs grow, customers simply add servers or storage arrays or add more vStart racks.

Besides enabling enterprises to quickly implement virtualized environments, Dell vStart can also be deployed to refresh aging servers, virtualize branch offices or specific departments, support mission-critical applications, and create infrastructure for private clouds.

To know more about vStart, log on to www.dell.com.