Unleashing the true potential of virtualization in the data center.
Whether your data center is supporting hundreds of applications or just a handful of mission-critical ones – and whether you’re providing services in the cloud or managing a more traditional data center deployment model – virtualization can be an important part of your IT strategy. But IT executives cannot unleash the true potential of virtualization if their ability to manage servers is handcuffed by static 2D spreadsheets and outdated data center management tools.
To deploy virtualized environments with optimum efficiency, more and more organizations are using Converged Physical Infrastructure Management™ (CPIM™), iTRACS’ dynamic, best-of-breed data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platform.
Confirm the best candidates for your virtualized environment.
With CPIM’s advanced interactive 3D visualization and automated workflows, you can quickly identify underutilized servers that are candidates for virtualization, confirm the physical infrastructure on which the virtualization will operate, and create step-by-step workflows for implementing the physical changes required. This can drive enormous value for the enterprise by helping you:
- Reduce and consolidate your existing servers to streamline the infrastructure
- Utilize each server at optimum capacity – no underutilized assets
- Speed time-to-value for your virtualization initiative – no wasted steps
- Reduce energy consumption and costs
- Reduce risk of maintenance and its unforeseen impacts on the live production environment
- Lower the costs associated with hardware and software support
- Quantify the demand individual business units have on your servers so chargeback to the businesses can be identified
CPIM software filters the server racks by space, power, and network capacity, displaying a colored-coded map of suggested destinations for the virtualized applications – all automatically. This eliminates guesswork, delays, and error-prone manual processes that can put your applications at risk.
By leveraging key metrics and specifications, such as power, capacity, and space, CPIM can help you identify the perfect server candidates, migrate applications to those servers, and decommission or repurpose existing hardware to reduce energy consumption.
Model your virtualization deployments before they go live.
Once you have identified your candidate servers, iTRACS lets you model your proposed virtualization deployments using “what if” scenarios – current vs. future states – that can be performed without impacting the live environment. You can predict the physical impact and evaluate the efficiency gains between deployment strategies before you spend a dollar or implement a single change.
These automated “what if” scenarios are vital for virtualization initiatives where you can’t afford to jeopardize your applications while striving to increase energy efficiency via cloud computing, footprint reduction, or technology refreshes for servers nearing the end of their leases.
For example, CPIM can help you:
- Identify low-performing, underutilized servers where certain applications are running periodically but not heavily
- Confirm the physical step-to-step process for “virtualizing” the applications across a new set of servers
- Run “what if” scenarios to confirm that the proposed changes will provide the intended performance and efficiency gains without negatively impacting the live environment
- Create detailed plans and work orders for each asset affected, right down to the connectivity of each port on each server
- Coordinate the execution of the plan to get the applications off those underperforming servers
- Decommission the underutilized servers once the applications have been removed – reducing energy consumption, eliminating maintenance risks, and consolidating your racks
