Server virtualization can enhance performance and lead to cloud computing agility

Standardizing and automating your data center prepares you for highly automated cloud computing models and enables your organization to consume IT as a service. As regulatory pressures drive up compliance costs, automation becomes increasingly critical to meeting your operational budgets. A highly virtualized data center lays the foundation for large-scale efficiencies, freeing your agency from the burden of data center management so you can focus on your core mission.

Whether you’re building a private cloud, scaling your services through a public cloud, or combining both models, the Microsoft array of virtualization tools lets you create the computing environment that works best for you. Cloud-based services help improve transparency, enhance collaboration among departments and organizations, and allow your agency to deliver interactive citizen services—even as they help reduce IT costs. They can even prepare you for disaster recovery and continuity of operations, because cloud applications don’t depend on agency servers or on-site staff.

You can create highly scalable public cloud infrastructure and Windows Azure services hosted in a Microsoft data center to create, scale, and manage .NET applications. With a private cloud, you get many of the benefits of public cloud computing plus the control, security, and customization available from dedicated resources.

Microsoft can simplify your journey to the cloud by providing guidance, best practices, and example configurations. Every day, we use Microsoft virtualization solutions to run large-scale cloud services, like Bing, Windows Live, and Windows Azure, in our data centers on hundreds of thousands of servers around the world. We invest our hands-on experience in the software that we deliver to you to run in your own data centers.

Streamlined management is essential to enabling a cost-effective, dynamic infrastructure, particularly as you extend virtualization more broadly and as your environment becomes increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Through packaged integration with third-party tools and systems, both multi-hypervisor management and cross-platform application monitoring can be optimized. The Microsoft solution include heterogeneous support for third-party operating systems (including UNIX and Linux), virtualization (such as Xen and VMware), and management applications (including HP, BMC, and IBM) to circumvent compatibility issues. With Microsoft virtualization, you get comprehensive, end-to-end management of physical, virtual, and cloud resources, across multiple operating systems and hypervisors—along with the critical application layer—through a single console.

Hyper-V can dramatically improve the performance of consolidated Microsoft server applications. This solution works seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and other mission-critical applications that have potential to be extended exponentially through virtualization. To cite one benchmark, the recent testing (by research firm Enterprise Strategy Group) of Hyper-V running Microsoft server applications demonstrated that Exchange Server 2010 scaled to 20,000 mailboxes on a single physical server, across four virtual machines (VMs), with extrapolation to 32,000 mailboxes.¹ As applications are freed from the limitations of a physical server infrastructure, they can be moved between servers to help improve availability and protect against outages.

Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center make up an enterprise-ready solution that can save your agency real money. Microsoft licensing fees are significantly lower than those of VMware, yet the feature set and extensibility Microsoft offers are more comprehensive and scalable. In fact, the Microsoft virtualization solution costs less than one-third of the comparable offering from VMware (Microsoft ECI Datacenter vs. VMware vSphere 5.0).²

Microsoft and its partners can help you align your virtualization strategy with your agency’s requirements and then guide you through every step of deployment. You can get started now by contacting one of the following Microsoft partners: