Data Centre Automation – virtualizing a data centre

IT organizations are under significant pressure to create, deliver and maintain flexible IT services that enable the business to respond quickly to changing business conditions. This growing need to support business agility requires a more dynamic, automated data center infrastructure. The existing physical infrastructure is difficult to automate, mired in complex dependencies and manual tasks. 

Businesses face increasing pressures from rapid changes in the global marketplace, as well as regulatory and compliance requirements, yet must keep capital and operational costs under control. It is critical for these organizations to react quickly to market conditions, new opportunities or competitive threats. On the other hand, they also must ensure that business goals are achieved in line with tightening budgets and in compliance with proliferating financial, industry or environmental regulations. Business agility is where responsiveness and flexibility meet risk mitigation and strict compliance – in other words, the ability to turn on a dime while maintaining an accurate record of what changed where and for what reason, all while ensuring that IT services are available 24/7. 

The promise of business agility is realized through a strategic data center platform that enables IT to execute successfully on these conflicting objectives: enabling rapid change, scalability, and efficiency while maintaining strict controls and mitigating risk, all while remaining within budget and on schedule. VMware Infrastructure provides a strategic platform for the virtual data center that enables business agility by creating greater levels of flexibility in the infrastructure and operations. Further, a new set of automation products from VMware will give customers the extra edge they need to take advantage of their virtualized data center infrastructure to automate critical IT processes to drive increased business agility.

Although virtualization serves as a starting point for automation, it relies on several capabilities in the virtualization platform itself. To automate IT processes effectively, virtual machines must be able to be moved on demand without disrupting users. Further, the platform must be scalable, efficient and provide high availability to protect critical applications. Dynamic resource pools also play a critical role in data centre automation. It is not enough to manage virtual machines on physical hosts. The system needs to be able to recognize and manage groups of resources, not just specific hosts and configurations. This allows IT organizations to treat a group of servers, storage and networking resources as a single group, and set up rules to dynamically reconfigure IT services on the fly. Virtual machines can be moved to where the resources are.