Goals and Objectives

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) provides end-to-end management capabilities for planning, deploying, managing, and optimizing virtual infrastructure.

This topic provides you with information about some of the possible business goals and objectives that you can achieve by using a virtualized environment managed with VMM.

Asset Consolidation and Increased Asset Utilization

On average, only 5 to 15 percent of a typical physical computer’s capacity is actually used. Computers running as virtual machines can operate at 60 percent utilization or greater, depending on the availability requirements of their workloads.

Computer consolidation is a priority for most organizations implementing virtual machine technology. By consolidating their physical computers, organizations can increase asset utilization and decrease replacement, maintenance, and operating costs.

Lower Power, Space, and Cooling Costs

Many data centers are operating at full capacity for space, power, and cooling. Because one physical computer can host many virtual machines, data center operations are more efficient, running more applications on fewer physical machines, thus reducing the associated operating costs.

Faster Response to Business Needs

Provisioning new computers can be a lengthy process, often measured in days and months. Instead of needing to manually procure and set up new physical computers, which is both time- and labor-intensive, IT administrators can quickly and easily provision new virtual machines and rapidly develop them to teams and business units as needed.

The process of provisioning new computers can be further streamlined by using the VMM Self-Service Portal. By using the VMM Self-Service Portal, the VMM administrator can designate self-service end users and grant them controlled access to specific virtual machines, templates, and other VMM resources by way of a Web-based portal. This access enables end users, such as test and development users, to quickly provision new virtual machines for themselves, according to controls set by the VMM administrator through self-service policies.

Business Continuity and Rapid Recovery

Another key benefit of virtualization is the ability to reduce scheduled and unscheduled downtime, along with the ability to rapidly recover an entire computer, including data and operating system state, to a previous point in time, last known good configuration, or bare metal state. Three major areas where virtualization can help with this issue are described in the following sections.

Full System Recovery

If a computer fails, it can be relatively easy to recover the data—databases, files, and folders—but recovering the entire system typically requires reinstalling and reconfiguring the operating system, and then the applications, which is a very time-consuming process. Most often, system failures result from a hardware failure, a system volume failure, or incompatible updates. By using virtual machines and VMM, you have the ability to checkpoint virtual machines at regular intervals or before specific events, such as updates or configuration changes. Then, you can revert to a previous point in time should anything go wrong.

Disaster Recovery

Most disaster recovery locations require hardware that is identical to the primary site and it can be difficult to recreate a system that matches the primary site, because of application and operating system state. Virtual machines make this recreation much easier, because they need to keep only virtual hard disk (vhd) files synchronized.

High Availability

Most downtime experienced is actually for planned activities like hardware maintenance or operating system and application updates. Downtime for a virtual machine host can be particularly troublesome, because it affects all the virtual machines running on that host.

Updates are applied at least monthly and hardware lease cycles generally run for about 3 years at which point the equipment needs to be replaced. By using VMM to manage the virtual environment, you have the ability to reduce the impact of these outages by moving virtual machines to other available hosts when their existing host becomes unavailable for any reason, planned or unplanned.

Development and Test Environments

You might have a significant number of in-house developers and testers, or host Web-based applications that have a development or test environment that is identical to the production environment. In such an environment, the ability to consolidate computers and to rapidly re-provision computers is particularly appealing. The following sections describe two scenarios in which virtualization can be helpful.

Sandbox Testing

Developers and testers often need computers to test new components that are being developed. Furthermore, they typically need several computers with a variety of configurations, with different processors, different operating systems, different update or version levels, etc. And typically, such computers are required for only a short period of time.

Instead of provisioning physical computers for this type of usage, VMM gives you the ability to provision virtual machines, on demand and as required by the development or test team. Because virtual machines can be provisioned much faster than physical computers, this can improve responsiveness to the development or test users.

Responsiveness can be further enhanced by making use of the VMM Self-Service Portal so that these users can provision their own pre-configured virtual machines.

Another feature of virtual machines that developers can take advantage of is the ability to create checkpoints that enable them to roll back an entire system—operating state and data—to a previous point in time. This ability to roll back allows developers to repeatedly test new code and then revert to the original configuration without needing to rebuild the computer from scratch.

Pre-Production Staging

You might also maintain replicas in your test labs of some production systems, such as a corporate Web site, an intranet, or intranet applications. Any time that updates are made to these systems, they are typically checked into the test environment before being moved to production.

While this process is safe and effective, it is typically costly to set up and maintain. Having the same number of computers in the test environment as in production doubles hardware and operating costs. By using virtual machines, you can reduce the number of physical test computers needed and even recreate an entire multi-tier environment on a single computer, which is very helpful with three-tier applications involving complex networking topologies. Furthermore, moving a computer from the test environment to production can be quicker, because the hardware dependencies have been eliminated.

See Also

Concepts

About VMM Components
Introducing Virtual Machine Manager
Features of VMM