Partners

IBM

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IBM is a leader in virtualization, with more than forty years of delivering broad-based products and services to a diverse set of customers. This rich experience has enabled IBM to bring superior virtualization capabilities, inspired by its mainframe legacy, into its x86 platforms. With an extensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, IBM helps customers build resilient infrastructures that are optimized for cost effectiveness, simplified management, and flexibility.

IBM and Microsoft Virtualization

By extending collaboration and optimizing IBM BladeCenter and System x servers for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft and IBM are helping organizations create extremely reliable, high-performing, flexible, and energy-efficient virtual data centers.

Optimize your data center with proven, high-performing virtualization technologies from the leaders in hardware and software virtualization. Microsoft and IBM enable midmarket and enterprise customers to amplify server virtualization benefits with hardware solutions that offer superior scalability and are designed to provide the reliability, high-speed input/output (I/O), enhanced memory, and flexibility that virtual environments demand. By running virtual machines with Hyper-V virtualization technology on IBM physical servers that feature energy-efficient solid-state drives, lower-power memory, and low-voltage processors, you can significantly reduce power and cooling requirements and realize improved total cost of ownership.

  • Proven Experience/Capabilities: Microsoft and IBM combine broad virtualization expertise with decades of delivering virtualization products and services to create high-performing data centers.

  • Reliable, Flexible Hardware Optimized for Virtualization: Deep integration between Microsoft and IBM offerings supports optimal configurations for virtual environments, including redundant power and I/O connections, high-density servers for fast I/O, up to a terabyte of memory in four nodes, and rugged solid-state disks.

  • Designed for Energy Efficiency: Running virtual machines on green platforms—IBM BladeCenter solid-state disks use 1 watt and System x servers can save more than 200 watts over competitors—helps maximize energy efficiency.

Customer Scenario

Analysts estimate that organizations spend U.S.$0.50 on power and cooling for every dollar spent on new hardware, and this is expected to quadruple over the next five years. Server virtualization and consolidation can reduce data center energy needs. However, virtualization requires tremendous memory and performance capacity; consolidation only increases risk. To fully realize data center virtualization benefits, organizations must implement a solution that is customized to their needs; has energy-efficient disk drives and processors; has the memory and I/O performance needed to support virtualized operating systems and applications; and has built-in reliability and redundancy to help ensure continuity and end-user productivity.

IBM + Microsoft Solution

Before building a virtual data center, it is essential that organizations collect the right foundational information, including knowing what to virtualize, which applications work well in a virtualized environment, and what type of utilization they need. Without the proper plans and guidance, organizations can be left with virtual machine sprawl, high costs, and severely diminished virtualization benefits. That is why Microsoft and IBM recommend working with vendors that have experience designing virtual infrastructures and understand how to help optimize these technologies.

Organizations must also keep in mind the goals that their business decision makers have for the virtual data center, such as disaster recovery, security, and scalability. This will enable them to allow for the appropriate efficiencies, power and space constraints, and storage requirements that must be built into the infrastructure strategy. Using all of this knowledge, organizations can determine how many virtual machines they want to run per server, which will direct the decision about which hardware platforms are best suited to the data center environment.

Microsoft and IBM provide hardware and software virtualization solutions that are optimized for high-power, energy-efficient data centers:

  • IBM System x enterprise servers leverage decades of mainframe server design to deliver an open and affordable, industry-standard server platform that can help tackle the most demanding workloads. The ideal platform for highly consolidated, virtual server environments, these servers deliver higher throughput and exceptional reliability.

  • IBM BladeCenter blade servers deliver optimal performance for enterprise environments with expanded memory and processor performance. They offer high density for better processor-to-memory performance, provide simplified local storage with rugged solid-state drives, and are optimized for the virtual data center with high-speed I/O and expanded memory.

  • 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.

Systems Management

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit for IBM

This toolkit, based on the MAP Toolkit platform, was developed by IBM at the IBM Center for Microsoft Technologies to accelerate the adoption of server virtualization hardware including IBM System x and BladeCenter together with Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology.

The MAP Toolkit is an integrated planning toolkit that makes it easier for Microsoft customers and partners to quickly identify what clients, servers, and network devices are in their IT environment. This agentless and scalable toolkit has the ability to discover all computers within Active Directory and workgroup environments. It performs key functions that include hardware, device, and software inventory, hardware compatibility analysis, virtualization readiness planning, and generation of actionable, environment-specific IT proposals for migration to most major Microsoft technologies.

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IBM

Announcing Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit for IBM
This toolkit, based on the MAP Toolkit platform, was developed by IBM at the IBM Center for Microsoft Technologies to accelerate the adoption of server virtualization hardware including IBM System x and BladeCenter together with Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology.
Download the MAP Toolkit for IBM version now

"IBM and Microsoft are both leaders in the IT industry, and we are committed to working together to provide the best possible solutions for our customers," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Microsoft Infrastructure Server Marketing. "Optimizing datacenters for virtualization is a strategy that can offer tremendous benefits to customers. We’re working with IBM to provide integrated hardware and software virtualization solutions that are built for high performing, energy-efficient datacenters, which maximize resources while helping to reduce energy costs."