Seamless Physical and Virtual Server Management

Virtualization is delivering significant benefits to IT organizations that employ virtualized server, storage, and file system solutions. As enterprise demand for new applications and capabilities shows no sign of slowing, neither do most IT budgets show any sign of expanding to match the need. Enterprises are turning to virtualization to maximize platform resources, and the approach is spreading beyond application development and testing labs to production systems—including application and Web server infrastructures. Yet, while virtualized resources help enterprises meet their growing capacity needs, they also pose serious new management challenges. The long-term success of virtualization strategies will depend on how well virtualized systems can be managed.

In addition, vendors are stepping up to support customers’ virtualization needs with a broader range of solutions, making it easier to virtualize operations. The original virtualization solution provider, VMware, is now joined by Sun Solaris 10, Microsoft Virtual Server, IBM LPAR, and XenSource. Not only can server resources be virtualized, now they can be virtualized on a wide range of platforms, which leads directly to virtualization’s most significant challenge—management.

This whitepaper explains how Opsware can help to manage traditional
server environments with the integrated capabilities required to successfully manage virtual server environments as well.