Journey Towards Cloud Computing

September 16, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Gagan Deep Saini.

As IT infrastructure is moving toward cloud frameworks, many organizations are investing in the consolidation of their data centers and working toward moving their existing heterogeneous data centers (Virtual Servers, Physical Servers) to complete a virtualized environment. Reducing power needs is just one reason why enterprises in virtually all industries are consolidating data centers. Other reasons include assimilating systems from companies acquired in mergers and acquisitions; cost-cutting; replacing outmoded server hardware and software with newer, more efficient models; and improving operational efficiency and most important moving towards cloud computing. In fact, improved operational efficiency was the reason behind data center consolidation that was cited by nearly 60 percent of the IT Industry…

Objective of Virtualization
Build a standard infrastructure that allocates resources and services dynamically to hosted applications and services in accordance with their needs and their SLA

  • Break the static link between an application or service and specific physical resources
  • Consolidate the installed base of applications and technical services on this infrastructure so as to reduce the number of physical resources and their running costs
  • Transform the processes – from development through to production – so as to improve time-to-market and reduce costs by using this new infrastructure
  • Transform system operations processes so as to benefit from the contribution brought by the implementation of these new technologies.

One of the important tools used to migrate to complete virtualized environment is P2V migration tool in VMWare.

Physical to Virtual Server Migration (P2V)
It is a power technology that is being used extensively to migrate servers from a physical environment to a virtual one without any downtime.

Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware vCenter Converter. Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware vCenter Converter to transform your physical machines to virtual machines.

  • Convert Microsoft Windows and Linux-based physical machines and third-party image formats to VMware virtual machines.
  • Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console.
  • Minimize the number of steps to conversion with easy-to-use wizards.

So, in the end data center consolidation toward virtualization is very important and a critical step toward Cloud Computing and hence an important topic to understand.