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14 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING VMWARE VSPHERE 4
Why Choose vSphere?
Much has been said and written about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment
(ROI) for virtualization projects involving VMware virtualization solutions. Rather than rehashing
that material here, I’ll instead focus, very briefly, on why an organization should choose VMware
vSphere as their virtualization platform.
Online TCO Calculator
VMware offers a web-based TCO calculator that helps you calculate the total cost of ownership and
return on investment for a virtualization project using VMware virtualization solutions. This calcu-
lator is available online at www.vmware.com/go/calculator.
You’ve already read about the various features that VMware vSphere offers. To help under-
stand how these features can benefit your organization, I’ll apply them to the fictional XYZ
Corporation. I’ll walk through several different scenarios and look at how vSphere helps in these
scenarios:
Scenario 1 XYZ Corporation’s IT team has been asked by senior management to rapidly
provision six new servers to support a new business initiative. In the past, this meant ordering
hardware, waiting on the hardware to arrive, racking and cabling the equipment once it
arrived, installing the operating system and patching it with the latest updates, and then
installing the application. The timeframe for all these steps ranged anywhere from a few days
to a few months and was typically a couple of weeks. Now, with VMware vSphere in place,
the IT team can use vCenter Server’s templates functionality to build a virtual machine, install
the operating system, and apply the latest updates, and then rapidly clone—or copy—this
virtual machine to create additional virtual machines. Now their provisioning time is down to
hours, likely even minutes. Chapter 7 will discuss this functionality in more detail.
Scenario 2 Empowered by the IT team’s ability to quickly respond to the needs of this
new business initiative, XYZ Corporation is moving ahead with deploying updated versions
of a line-of-business application. However, the business leaders are a bit concerned about
upgrading the current version. Using the snapshot functionality present in ESX/ESXi and
vCenter Server, the IT team can take a ‘‘point-in-time picture’’ of the virtual machine so that if
something goes wrong during the upgrade, it’s a simple rollback to the snapshot for recovery.
Chapter 7 discusses snapshots.
Scenario 3 XYZ Corporation is really impressed with the IT team and vSphere’s functional-
ity and is now interested in expanding their use of virtualization. In order to do so, however, a
hardware upgrade is needed on the servers currently running ESX/ESXi. The business is wor-
ried about the downtime that will be necessary to perform the hardware upgrades. The IT team
uses VMotion to move virtual machines off one host at a time, upgrading each host in turn
without incurring any downtime to the company’s end users. Chapter 10 discusses VMotion
in more depth.
Scenario 4 After the great success it’s had virtualizing its infrastructure with vSphere, XYZ
Corporation now finds itself in need of a new, larger shared storage array. vSphere’s support
for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS gives XYZ room to choose the most cost-effective storage
solution available, and the IT team uses Storage VMotion to migrate the virtual machines with-
out any downtime. Chapter 6 discusses Storage VMotion.