How to Virtualize Your Servers and Load Balancers by Abtech Systems

“Virtualize Everything” We’ll Show you How
Abtech’s Virtualize Everything™ Assessment identifies additional candidates for consolidation and virtualization, and we show you where you can realize additional cost savings in your virtual data center.
Don’t let server sprawl and platform dependencies prevent your organization from achieving its goals.  Abtech can help you take control of your IT infrastructure with our Virtualize Everything assessment.
Our in depth analysis considers critical core-applications as well as other applications and systems that have a significant impact on your bottom line such as racks of power & network equipment, front-end web and application servers, load balancers, network appliances and other applications that can benefit from a consolidation plan.  Abtech’s virtualization strategy can help your organization cut capital and operating costs while increasing IT service delivery without being locked into limited choices of operating systems, applications, and hardware.
Increased flexibility, better scalability, higher availability, lower and a reduced footprint. It’s a formula for success from Abtech Systems
Storage Management for Virtual Machines
Building a virtual storage network that improves high-availability, reduces costly resources and simplifies storage management should be prime objective to virtualizing your data center. Like server virtualization, it too should offer fast ROI and low TCO for having implemented it.
Abtech can help you optimize data storage in a virtual environment, with a plan that includes your existing storage systems and offers the best strategy for serving applications with better performance & availability, simplified storage allocation and improved business continuance.
Key benefits of Abtech designed virtual storage networks:

• Improved high-availability & storage services for all applications
• Reduced costs – energy consumption, hardware, services, administration & expansion
• Simplified storage management  - Thin provisioning, LUN & Volume creation / expansion , Data migration & replication
• Integrated data services across SAN, LAN and WAN
• Zero time back-up window & up to instantaneous point-in-time recovery
• Storage benefits apply to non-virtualized servers & application data, i.e. HP-UX, AIX

With good design, a combination of VMware virtualization and storage virtualization can provide organizations of any size with 0.001% unplanned downtime. In fact, planned downtime is a breeze to manage with automated processes for server upgrades, back-ups, off-site data replication even server creation or cloning and other functions that help improve service-levels for your customers.

Virtualize Everything Else?
Abtech believes virtualization does not need to stop at applications, storage and servers. Virtualizing non-critical applications such as load balancers, VPN’s, network security devices and other services can provide you with the same benefits as virtualizing core application servers. You may have racks of network appliances and front-end applications that can also be virtualized, providing new flexibility for deployment, expansion, higher availability and a reduced footprint.  Infrastructure that can benefit from virtualization includes:

• Non-critical, resource consuming applications
• Development Servers
• VPN’s
• Front End Web Servers
• Load Balancers
• Application Traffic Managers
• Network Monitoring Applications
• Network Security & Services

Many of Abtech’s software partners offer products that run on top of VMware and replace costly physical appliances which do not scale well for performance or user count changes, nor tier well to meet the demands of the remote office or private cloud.
Imagine having the ability to deploy and scale SSL, load balancing and application traffic management resources on demand, running on existing x86 servers with all of the benefits of a virtual environment. Now, imagine being able to automate scalability, migration and back-up of these applications securely to the appropriate physical resource as demands change.
Typically, with load balancers and traffic management, organizations are forced to purchase appliances that include licenses for a maximum potential usage within a given period, say three years. This means you spend higher up front costs for an appliance with exceedingly larger resources than you require the majority of the time or potentially worse, one sized too low which is outgrown before ROI is realized.
Virtualizing these applications frees you from locked-in performance and provides flexibility for services that are dynamic in nature, with flexible costs structures that match. Implement these into your virtualization plan and you are headed toward the creation of your Private Cloud.
Abtech can go further in identifying applications and resources qualified for virtualization, showing you alternative solutions that will help you build a more dynamic infrastructure.