The Dividends from VMware and HP Storage Upgrades
Many of our customers run a PEI designed combination of VMware virtualized servers and HP Storage. The architecture has proven to be both powerful and agile. If you rely on either, or both, there are times when version upgrades pay real dividends.
The latest VMware vSphere 4.1 upgrade is one of those times! vSphere 4.1 offers a number of compelling solutions that addresses key pain points and enhances the value of your VMware investment. For small and midsize businesses, the new vSphere 4.1 delivers higher efficiency, greater agility, and more freedom of choice than ever before, making it easier than ever to optimize existing assets and get always-on IT with comprehensive, cost-effective backup and recovery, resulting in a solution that can help customers achieve rapid, sustainable growth.
Efficiency through Utilization and Automation – vSphere 4.1 enables higher consolidation ratios with unequaled performance by providing groundbreaking new memory management technology, and by expanding its storage, networking, and automation capabilities.
Agility with Control – vSphere 4.1 extends its award-winning availability and security capabilities with the world’s fastest live migrations and the ability to respond in parallel to any business need or change. Application services enhancements deliver new status details for high availability, tighter integration with an existing directory services, and advanced patching. New features are provided with vMotion™, High Availability, Data Recovery, Active Directory Integration, and vCenter Update Manager
If you’re also relying on the Hewlett Packard P4000 SAN (formerly known as the Lefthand SAN), the latest 9.0 software release is a tremendous complement to the VMware upgrade. The new 9.0 release is a comprehensive release that includes significant enhancements with:
- New global configurations done at the management group
- Automated online upgrade management to apply updates more easily
- Alarms and Event enhancements
- Network RAID 5 and 6 enhancements
- VMware VAAI vStorage offloads – faster VM deployments and less server load
- Central Management Console enhancements
- Improved Host server cluster management
- Many other benefits
What does this all mean? In a nutshell, these upgrades deliver real performance gains and extend the useful life of your server/storage investments. If you’d like to learn more, we encourage you to speak to your PEI Sales or Technical representative. Given the reasonable time necessary to perform these upgrades, this may be the wisest investment you’ll make all year.
-Tim Krueger, PEI
