What is VMware and where can it fit in my Infrastructure?

VMware virtual infrastructure software is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. VMware essentially reduces IT growing pains by consolidating industry-standard servers, optimising software development, and enabling affordable business continuity. Conceptually, VMware software enables you to run multiple Virtual Machines of various conflicting OS (Linux, Windows, Free BSD, Netware) concurrently on the same physical box. Ramping up valuable utilisation, providing ease of management and high availability in the following key areas:

Server Consolidation
Virtual infrastructure enables unprecedented levels of workload isolation, granular resource control for all of the system's computing and I/O resources. Virtual Infrastructure integrates well with existing system management software and improves return on investment in shared storage (SAN). By consolidating physical systems in the data centre onto servers with VMware virtual infrastructure, enterprises experience:

• Lower hardware acquisition and maintenance costs
• Consolidation of idle system resources
• Increased operational efficiency
• Cost-effective and consistent production environments

Test and Development Automation
VMware software encapsulates complete test platform applications and data into files. These files can be easily stored, suspended, resumed, and transported between physical servers. Due to the isolation guaranteed by VMware software, multiple virtual test platforms can run on the same physical server without interfering with each other. Furthermore, virtual infrastructure has many functions specifically designed for optimising test and development environments - from system snapshot to support for system level debugging.

With VMware software, enterprise development organizations can:

• Partition a single physical platform into dozens of isolated development environments
• Copy exact multi-module production environment into virtual machines for testing
• Share complete environments among different teams
• Eliminate repetitive configuration tasks from development and testing cycles
• Automate many testing sequences that previously required manual intervention
• Simulate complex networked applications on a single physical platform

Business Continuity

Using virtual infrastructure, you can improve all aspects of business continuity, such as:

• Faster and less expensive disaster recovery due to hardware independence between primary and failover servers
• Elimination of scheduled hardware downtime and dramatic reduction in scheduled software downtime
• Single point of control for managing all the virtual machines and monitoring their host machines
• Encapsulation of complete machines into files for capture and recovery
  Simplified and repeatable automated processes