Virtualization Management

Virtualization projects are trendy but they may also seem expensive and challenging. At the same time, they offer a vital strategic business advantage. Logicstrong’s goal is to meet and resolve those challenges, as well as bring substantial cost savings, increased IT capacity and business continuity advantages with optimized IT investments.

Logicstrong consultants assist in all the aspects of virtualization from comprehensive IT infrastructure assessment and gap analysis, infrastructure planning and design, financial analysis (including licensing optimization), implementation and migration to ongoing management and maintenance using Microsoft, VMware, Parallels, and Sun virtualization solutions:

Virtualization may answer the toughest problems of the enterprise IT infrastructure and bring tangible business benefits.

Issues

  • Underutilized hardware, data centers run out of space, increasing power costs
  • System administration brings increasing cost of operations and is usually
    co-located with servers
  • High-availability service level agreement (SLA) requirements

Virtualization Solution

  • Reducing equipment, facilities, and operating costs, achieving storage and energy efficiency
  • Reduced system administration requirements, effective coordinating management and operations across virtualization environment
  • Enhancing business continuity metrics by improving system manageability and security

Migrating to Virtual Environment

  • The decision to move to virtual environments is based on a thorough investigation of the current infrastructure. At this stage, we assist you with evaluation of your existing system as a virtualization platform and find niches for operational costs optimization by means of virtualization.

  • Virtualization Planning

    • Requirements gathering
    • High-level architecture development
    • Knowledge transfer
  • Virtualization Design and Implementation

    • Detailed design
    • Test, staging and validation plan
    • Product acquisition and implementation plan
    • Rollout and migration plan

The assessment and planning phase of a migration project is crucial for its success and covers the following aspects:

  • Designing of network architecture ready for virtualization;
  • Backup and recovery;
  • Network and server power backup;
  • Virtualization roadmap development (including testing piece virtualization, planning of services interruption, licensing package optimization, monitoring and virtualization management tools implementation, and others).

Based on the project plan Logicstrong's specialists can perform full-cycle migration including but not limited to the following activities:

  • Creating virtual data centers on host servers;
  • Physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual server migration (based on VMware, Microsoft, Xen Server or Virtual Iron platforms);
  • Special solutions for distributed servers consolidation (mail servers, database servers), hot and cold conversion;
  • VM monitoring;
  • VM optimization;
  • VM backup and restore mechanisms.

Virtualization Management Lifecycle

scheme

  • P2V Conversion

    • Windows / Linux systems or selected disks / volumes VMware ESX Server / Workstation
    • MS Hyper-V Server / Virtual Server/Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer
  • VM Monitoring

    • Tracking the state of virtual infrastructure
    • Processes control within VMs
    • Viewing content of VM disks
    • Notifications, conditional events
  • VM Optimization

    • Removing redundant data
    • Resizing partitions
    • Compacting sparse disk images
    • Increasing perfomance
    • Rich reporting & statistics
  • VM Backup /Restore

    • Backup to a local / network storage
    • “Hot” or “cold” backup
  • V2V Conversion

    • Take one virtual system
    • And clone it to other virtual system
    • Offline conversion for better perfomance
  • Quick Application Unfolding

    • Install an app into a VM
    • Grab the changes
    • Quick apply to other VMs
  • V2V Conversion

    • Clone to dissimular hardware
    • Cold device driver installation technology
    • Bare metal conversion using Windows PE

Optimizing the Virtual Environment

Optimization of information systems performance by optimization of virtual and physical servers’ structure allows improving the utility rate of the current infrastructure.

  • VM storage optimization

    The automated tracking process of over-allocated and possible outages VM storage enables clients to manage their existing storage more efficiently. After potential storage savings are estimated it’s time for rightsizing and fixing VMs which are running out of storage.

  • Optimizing VM performance

    With the virtual machine performance going up, more virtual machines can be squeezed onto a host server, thereby achieving higher virtual machine density.

  • VM rightsizing automation

    To reach better performance, the custom virtual appliance initiates a series of virtual machine reconfigurations (rightsizing) which continuously adjust to dynamic virtual infrastructure conditions.

Quick Start