Virtualization

Virtualization technologies provide immediate cost saving by enabling organizations to do more with less.  Making the switch to a virtualized environment can dramatically reduce your server footprint while creating a highly available solution that will scale and allocate your storage, network, and computing resources.  The virtual infrastructure approach creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, allowing administrators to allocate these virtual resources quickly to varying business units as needs dictate.   DSM’s virtualization solutions help businesses and government agencies reduce energy costs, become more agile and efficient, and achieve lower carbon emissions – making them “greener”.   In addition, the flexibility that comes from virtualization enhances business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.

DSM utilizes VMware to provide complete end-to-end virtualization services for our client’s virtual infrastructure project needs.  Our talented, highly-accredited and cross-certified professionals consist of industry leading experts who have focused on the development of outstanding virtual infrastructure solutions and services.  We provide virtualization assessments, health checks, design, implementations, virtual disaster recovery (VDR), and full scale migrations to a virtual infrastructure environment.  At DSM, our mission is to provide unparalleled service and solutions at a reasonable cost so that our clients can quickly capitalize on all the benefits of virtualization.

Virtualization Assessment

Leveraging VMware Capacity Planner, DSM collects information about the client’s server environment and uses this information to help determine the optimal VMware Virtual Infrastructure configuration.  Over the course of the assessment, VMware Capacity Planner:

• Discovers systems in the clients data center environment
• Collects hardware, operating system, and software inventory about the discovered systems
• Continually monitors performance utilization about those systems
• Logs any collection issues that have occurred

DSM conducts this virtualization assessment to inform the customer of the scope of the collection and any issues that have been found.  When the assessment is completed, we provide the client with a Progress Report which shows the results of the collection and a proposed virtualization recommendation.  The sections in this Progress Report will show:

• High level overview of assessment goals
• Revised summary of the data center environment analyzed
• The collection success rate and a table of common collection issues
• The system capacity and utilization that have successful collection
• Proposed VMware Virtual Infrastructure configuration

Server Consolidation and Containment

Don’t let server sprawl and platform dependencies prevent your organization from achieving its goals. DSM can implement virtual infrastructure solutions that put you in control of your IT infrastructure and help it to reach its full potential.  The server consolidation and containment advantages realized from virtualization include:

• Reduce hardware and operating costs up to 50%.
• Reduce the time it takes to provision new servers as much as 70%.
• Save over $3,000 each year for every server workload virtualized.
• Increase utilization of existing hardware up to 80% from 10-15%.
• Reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better.

Business Continuity

Virtualization enables you to reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity by encapsulating entire systems into single files that can be replicated and restored on any target server, thus minimizing downtime.  Traditional high availability solutions are often relatively complex and expensive, and typically reserved for mission critical applications.  Virtual infrastructure changes the economics of high availability and makes it accessible for the majority of software applications that have until now been left unprotected.

Virtual Desktops

Business today operates onsite, offsite and offshore by a variety of employees who range from permanent staff to contractors.  This presents a number of challenges to IT security administrators.

DSM’s desktop manageability and security solutions allow security administrators to lock down PC endpoints and protect company resources against the risks presented by unmanaged PCs.  Leveraging proven virtualization technology, DSM’s solutions enable a level of desktop manageability and security that would be impossible with traditional desktop environments running on dedicated physical PCs.

Using virtual machines allows IT security administrators to easily:

• Provision secured, IT-managed endpoints on unmanaged PCs
• Secure confidential data on endpoint PCs
• Run multiple secure PC environments on a single PC

Get more information on our Microsoft or Networking core competencies.

Storage Virtualization

The unrelenting growth of company data drives a constant need for additional storage.  But with storage directly attached to servers, growth means burdensome storage management and decreased asset utilization.  Storage resources remain trapped behind individual servers, impeding data availability. Consolidation in a storage area network (SAN) is an affordable way to alleviate the problem, and an easy to deploy iSCSI SAN technology brings the benefits of consolidation to all your data.  With a fully redundant solution DSM’s customers can leverage centralized storage to gain simpler management and improved availability.

Virtual storage can grow on demand as needs change.  This solution will provide the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability.

Benefits of Virtual Storage include:

• Increased productivity
• Maximum availability
• Increased asset utilization
• Scalability with better performance

VMware Health Check

The VMware Health Check includes an assessment of current VMware Infrastructure configuration, operations, and usage, and a detailed audit of the VMware Infrastructure.

DSM Professional Services analyzes and reports which documents the observations and findings of the VI Health Check.  This report is intended to:

• Document the inventory of systems analyzed
• Help gauge how well the virtual infrastructure is configured and being used relative to VMware best practices, and identify areas needing attention and/or remediation
• Provide detailed recommended changes to configuration and usage per VMware best practices that may improve utilization and operations
• Serve as a reference to review best practices and issues discussed during the onsite visit
  

VI Health Check Report Card

The VI Health Check Report Card presents an overall view of the VI Health Check assessment conducted, using the following grades.