Partners

Dell

To Partner Overview

Dell is committed to simplifying IT by delivering and supporting technology infrastructure choices that help improve reliability, increase energy efficiency, and reduce overall IT life-cycle costs. Dell partners with customers to help resolve their technology challenges through a broad range of innovative product offerings, including desktop computer systems, servers, networking products, mobility products, software, peripherals, and enhanced services.

Dell and Microsoft Virtualization

Virtualization solutions from Dell with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 deliver the benefits of a consolidated, virtualized environment with simplified management of your physical and virtual infrastructures.

Microsoft and Dell believe that a virtualization solution should reduce IT complexity, not increase it. With integrated, end-to-end solutions based on familiar, industry-standard tools, Microsoft and Dell provide you with all the resources you need to reap the benefits of virtualization. Dell provides a single source for hardware, software, services, and support to customers who are implementing Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology. By tapping the experience and expertise of these two leading technology companies, customers can move forward into virtualization with confidence.

  • Tailored Solutions: Design a flexible, feature-rich virtualization solution that is appropriate for business, staff, and budget, which addresses today’s challenges and is built to handle tomorrow’s needs.

  • Simplified Management: Proactively manage virtual and physical environments with a single, integrated, management solution—increasing efficiency, maximizing resources, and reducing total cost of ownership.

  • Accelerated Time to Value: Accelerate virtualization deployments and empower IT staff for ongoing success by taking advantage of extensive lab and field experience from Dell, along with its robust support and consulting options.

Customer Scenario

Modern data centers have become increasingly complex to manage and expensive to maintain. IT departments may spend 70 percent of their resources maintaining existing infrastructure, leaving just 30 percent to drive innovation to support the business. Organizations need to cut IT costs while simultaneously increasing flexibility and responsiveness to user demands. Virtualization can increase the utilization of existing resources, decrease the time necessary to provision new servers, reduce energy use and server sprawl, and increase IT scalability. The challenge for businesses is to find a solution that is appropriate for current needs and flexible enough to adapt to future challenges.

Dell + Microsoft Solution

Virtualization offers substantial benefits for organizations of all sizes. Microsoft and Dell deliver integrated solutions that can be tailored to specific business and IT needs.

Here are a few questions to help evaluate whether a virtualization solution is right for a particular business/IT scenario:

  • Is the solution affordable? Virtualization doesn’t have to be expensive to be successful. A high-quality, low-cost solution can produce a significant return on investment. Organizations should look for a solution provider that has experience working with businesses of all sizes to maximize the return on virtualization dollars.

  • How steep is the learning curve to manage the system? Virtualization should ease IT management by supporting a variety of physical and virtual servers from a common interface, integrating hardware and software management while providing a familiar and intuitive user interface.

  • Are the server and storage platforms optimized for virtualization? Virtualization requires significant computing resources, so servers must include sufficient memory, input/output (I/O) throughput, and processing power. Shared storage should be scalable and easy to manage. Access to published reference configurations helps accelerate solution design.

  • Are the server and storage platforms optimized for virtualization? Virtualization requires significant computing resources, so servers must include sufficient memory, input/output (I/O) throughput, and processing power. Shared storage should be scalable and easy to manage. Access to published reference configurations helps accelerate solution design.

  • Is the solution designed to be energy efficient? With energy costs rising, an ideal solution will be built on top of hardware that maximizes power while minimizing kilowatt usage.

Microsoft and Dell offer an integrated solution that provides customers with all the tools and resources they need to plan and implement a successful virtualization deployment:

Services:

  • Dell Infrastructure Consulting provides comprehensive assessment, design, and implementation services to accelerate adoption of virtualization technologies from Microsoft.

  • Dell ProSupport gives users the opportunity to directly align support to address critical challenges. The ProSupport Remote Advisory services option provides fast telephone access to technical experts for consulting on virtualization implementations.

Management:

  • Microsoft System Center Management Suite is a family of leading IT management solutions that helps IT departments proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize an IT environment. System Center solutions help IT staff automate operations, improve application delivery, and enhance service delivery.

  • Dell Management Pack and Dell Hardware Update Catalog tools provide integration with Microsoft System Center Management Suite and System Center Essentials, allowing users to manage Dell servers, client computers, storage, and printers in multi-vendor hardware and software environments.

  • Dell Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) Pack is designed to simplify management of virtual machines hosted on Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell Server PRO management pack integrates Dell PowerEdge Blade and Server knowledge to generate alerts for monitored hosts that transition to unhealthy states. Based on alert severity of the health status of power, temperature, memory, storage controller, or disk, Dell PRO-Pack notifications generate recommended remediation actions such as migration of VMs or placement of servers in maintenance mode.

  • Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables centralized management of physical and virtual IT infrastructures, increased server utilization, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms.

Platform:

  • Dell PowerEdge Servers deliver industry-leading performance and energy efficiency with design optimized for virtualization, including double the amount of memory and available I/O and multi-core processors.

  • Dell Storage Solutions offer a broad choice of easy-to-manage and highly scalable Fibre Channel and iSCSI-based storage platforms designed to meet the needs of different environments.

  • Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V consolidates multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine so that users can efficiently run multiple operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and take advantage of the 64-bit operating environment.

Solution Briefs

White Papers

Best Practice Guides

Reference Architectures

Scalability Briefs

Webcasts

  • Dell - Enabling The Virtual Data Center Simply & Cost Effectively
    Server virtualization is one of the most significant technology trends in IT environments today, and a key enabler of the next generation virtual data center. With the introduction of Microsoft® Hyper-V, server virtualization becomes truly pervasive, reaching all segments of the IT market. Discover how the Dell PowerEdge™ Servers and the Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series virtualized iSCSI SANs integrate directly with Microsoft WS 2008 Hyper-V to provide a fully virtualized infrastructure that simply and cost-effectively delivers high availability, resiliency, flexibility, and scalability. In this session you will learn how to utilize current WS 2008 Hyper-V capabilities, as well as emerging developments including Microsoft Failover Servers and Quick Migration that can enhance your virtualized storage and server infrastructure.

  • Virtualization Webcast
    Mark Bowker, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, discusses virtualization with Radhesh Balakrishnan of Microsoft and Burk Buechler of Dell.

Demos

Press releases

Case Studies

  • Hot Schedules Customer Case Study
    HotSchedules deployed Windows Server 2008 featuring Hyper-V virtualization technology to virtualize its existing environment, which can now host up to 19 virtual machines on each physical server.

  • Hot Schedules Customer Video
    With help from Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, HotSchedules deployed a virtualized server infrastructure with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V running on Dell PowerEdge servers and supported by a Dell PowerVault iSCSI storage solution.

  • Maxol Customer Case Study
    Maxol uses the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to consolidate servers and simplify management.

Professional Services

  • Dell Global Services – Virtualization Practice

    Consultants from Dell’s Virtualization Practice can help customers virtualize and consolidate servers, expanding IT capacity without building new facilities

  • Dell’s Microsoft Consulting Practice

    Together, Dell and Microsoft can help simplify IT by providing a virtualization strategy that mobilizes and manages the resources of the entire infrastructure, both virtual and physical, to meet fast-moving business demands.

To Partner Overview
Dell

"We want to deliver solutions that help IT organizations drive results for their business, and virtualization is a big part of this," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Microsoft Infrastructure Server Marketing. "Dell and Microsoft believe that a virtualization solution should reduce IT complexity to help achieve these better business results. The integrated end-to-end solutions that Dell and Microsoft offer provide an easy path for our mutual customers to embrace virtualization and drive business results."

On Demand Webcast: Enabling The Virtual Data Center Simply & Cost Effectively

Discover how the Dell PowerEdge™ Servers and the Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series virtualized iSCSI SANs integrate directly with Microsoft WS 2008 Hyper-V to provide a fully virtualized infrastructure