Datasheet

Part I: Ready, Set, Go with VMware Infrastructure 3

 VMware Infrastructure Standard: This is ESX with more bells and

whistles and offers everything in the Foundation level plus High

Availability. This allows you to essentially create an active-passive

cluster and would be the minimum level of fault tolerance that is

acceptable for production systems.

 VMware Infrastructure Enterprise: Every available option — If you

want it all, then this is for you. This package provides every possible fea-

ture to enable active-active fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing

across servers. If you are virtualizing datacenters, you want the

Enterprise package.

Benefitting from VMware Infrastructure 3

Virtualization simply makes life easier from a technical and administrative

viewpoint. Fortunately, it also makes life easier from an economic viewpoint,

so everyone can agree that virtualization is a good thing. Before you decide

to virtualize, consider some of its many benefits:

 Better hardware usage rates: This translates to needing less hardware

to do the same amount of work.

 Lower hardware-maintenance costs: You need fewer physical servers,

which means less maintenance contracts to pay for.

 Lower cooling costs: Less heat is generated, so less cooling is needed.

 Lower electric costs: You have fewer physical servers so your electric

bill drops. VMware is a very green technology.

 Lower space costs: Your server room can be much smaller, which leaves

more room for offices. And face it, it is the people in the office that pro-

duce your company’s income. The server room is an expense that you

can help minimize.

 Longer infrastructure run time from UPSes: If you virtualize all your

physical servers and keep the same UPS system, think how much longer

it can run during an outage — especially if you are condensing twenty or

thirty virtual machines onto one physical machine.

 Faster server deployment: You can deploy a new server in as little time

as about 15 minutes. And you don’t need to spec-out hardware and wait

for delivery. In fact, deploying a server from a template is as easy as

right-clicking and answering a few simple questions.

 Simplified management: All your virtual servers use the same drivers,

and servers are just a collection of files on a hard disk. Whether you’re

installing a program or adding virtual hardware to a server, all servers

are managed through the same client.

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