Enterprise datacenters provide the availability and predictability necessary to deliver dependable, secure IT services. Yet all too often, datacenters are also a source of inefficiency, server sprawl, low utilization rates, redundant management, and administrative tasks. These issues can add up to excessive cost, complexity, and risk.

Virtualization technology provides a solution. The right virtual infrastructure software, running on the right servers and storage systems, enables you to use your existing resources more efficiently. It can open the door to strategic initiatives that dramatically reduce cost and complexity, such as server and storage consolidation, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

No two companies provide more complete, mature, and proven virtualization solutions than Sun and our strategic partner, VMware. Thousands of enterprises worldwide use VMware Infrastructure software to maximize the manageability, flexibility, and efficiency of their datacenter infrastructures. And Sun's vision of a virtual datacenter is redefining how IT services are designed, deployed, and managed in mission-critical environments. Together, Sun and VMware offer a virtual datacenter solution that works in the real world.

Highlights

Improve the cost and efficiency of your mission-critical datacenter infrastructure and enhance disaster-recovery capabilities
Leverage VMware Infrastructure products, which include ESX Server and VirtualCenter, running on Sun Fire x64 servers and enterprise storage solutions from Sun
Treat your datacenter as a single pool of processing, storage, and network power
Dynamically map computing resources to your business needs, provision new services, and reallocate resources on the fly
Reduce IT cost, risk, and complexity; improve utilization rates for critical systems, disaster-recovery capabilities, and service levels delivered to end users; and lower power and cooling costs

Core components: VMware products available on Sun

Sun is an OEM reseller of key VMware products and technologies, making it easier than ever for you to consolidate through virtualization. Sun sells and supports VMware Infrastructure 3 products, which include ESX Server and VirtualCenter.

ESX Server

ESX Server is a robust, production-proven virtualization layer that abstracts processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. ESX Server delivers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and robustness required for enterprise IT environments.

Using ESX Server, you can:

Host multiple virtual machines
Easily provision new services
Instantly deploy new virtual machines to any server as business requirements change
Streamline datacenter operations and reduce hardware requirements
Perform zero-downtime maintenance on live systems without interrupting service
Load balance workloads across a farm of servers

VirtualCenter

VirtualCenter delivers centralized management, operational automation, resource optimization, and high availability to IT environments. Virtualization-based distributed services equip the datacenter with unprecedented levels of responsiveness, serviceability, efficiency, and reliability. VirtualCenter can help you manage a virtualized IT environment of any size. Using VirtualCenter, you can:

Provision and boot virtual machines hosted on ESX Server
Monitor system availability and performance
Automate notifications and email alerts
Integrate with existing management tools
Secure the environment with robust access control

Sun and VMware: Virtual infrastructure for real-world datacenter challenges

VMware is one of the most successful software businesses of the new millennium, providing technology that has been adopted by thousands of enterprises because it improves datacenter efficiency and IT service levels at the same.

VMware technology transforms physical resources such as Sun Fire x64 servers into multiple virtual operating system environments, and encapsulates operating systems and applications into virtual machines. The result is a standard, hardware-independent environment that can be provisioned anywhere—so you can choose the right operating system for each application, including the Solaris 10 Operating System, and multiple versions of Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Each virtual machine supported by VMware Infrastructure software supports an idealized hardware environment, including CPUs, memory, disk, and even BIOS

Sun Fire x64 servers deliver high compute density in a small footprint to ease datacenter space, power, and cooling constraints. Sun x64 servers, both in rack and blade form factors, deliver high compute density in a small footprint to ease datacenter space, power, and cooling constraints. Powered by AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors, Sun x64 servers offer the benefits of enterprise-class reliability, scalability, and availability in an industrystandard platform. And, to help simplify management of your IT infrastructure, Sun x64 servers have features that enhance manageability, such as Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM).

By combining VMware products with Sun Fire x64 servers and popular enterprise storage solutions from Sun, you can leverage the virtualization capabilities of VMware with the proven availability, reliability, high performance, and rock-solid security of Sun servers and storage. VMware Infrastructure 3 products such as VI3 Enterprise, VI3 Standard, and VirtualCenter are available directly from Sun and fully supported by Sun.

VMware Infrastructure includes support for the Solaris 10 OS, allowing you to take advantage of advanced features such as Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and Solaris Containers. With special optimizations for Sun Fire x64 servers, the Solaris 10 OS powers enterprise applications at record speeds on supported Sun Fire x64 servers.

Consolidate. Simplify. Save.

Many enterprises still run one application per server, and often utilize only five to 15 percent of their server CPU capability. VMware on Sun provides a practical and cost-effective alternative to this inefficient model. When you consolidate servers or storage systems, you simplify the environment, in turn cutting administrative costs. You unlock surplus server and storage capacity. And you help boost the utilization rates of the systems you already have, so you can delay or eliminate the need to make additional hardware purchases.

With VMware, you can consolidate disparate systems, such as branch office and datacenter or mission-critical applications and infrastructure, onto fewer highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers from Sun. You can achieve solid bottom-line results in a surprisingly short timeframe.

Better disaster recovery at lower cost

Every organization understands the importance of business continuity planning. Natural disasters, terrorist acts, administrative errors, and unplanned power outages can cause system failures, data loss, business disruption, and massive expense. At the same time, new government regulations have created more stringent requirements for disaster preparedness.

With Sun and VMware products, you can easily move virtual machine images to remote sites, where they are ready to take over your mission-critical activities at a moment's notice.

Sun and VMware can help cut disaster recovery costs because fewer servers are required for hot or warm standby. This reduces costs associated with hardware, hardware support, maintenance contracts, and environmental expenses associated with disaster recovery instances. Equally important, because there are fewer servers, you can reduce the complexity and timeframes of failing over to the disaster recovery instances and failing back to production instances. Simply put, Sun and VMware improve your disaster recovery capabilities while enabling you to cut costs.

Test before you invest

Use Sun's Try & Buy program and a VMware evaluation license to give virtualization and consolidation a test drive in your datacenter.

You can see a demonstration of VMware solutions at your nearest Sun Solution Center. At our worldwide centers, Sun takes the guesswork and risk out of implementing solutions. We give you access to the latest Sun servers, storage devices, and software, so you can try out a prototype, size your systems, and do your benchmarks on rock-solid platform technology. You go from the drawing board to production faster, cutting cost and risk while accelerating time to deployment.

Learn More

Together, Sun and VMware can transform the potential of virtualized infrastructure into real-world results. Contact your local Sun or VMware representative today for complete information about our joint solutions, or visit sun.com for additional details.