Virtualizing

Business-Critical
Applications on
VMware vSphere
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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Table of Contents

Executive Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Virtualization Journey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
VMware vSphere And VMware vCenter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Application Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Virtual Machine Scalability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Better Application Scalability On Multicore Servers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
What About Databases?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
What About SAP? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
What About Exchange? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Consolidation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Database Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Software License Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
“Applications as a Service” In The Private Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Accelerate The Application Lifecycle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Guarantee Application Quality Of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
ISV Support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Specific ISV Statements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Microsoft Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Oracle Support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Executive Summary High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and Site Recovery
Manager (SRM)—protect all applications from hardware-related
downtime without the complexity of application-level clustering.
The ISV ecosystem supporting VMware is strong and rapidly
In the past, most VMware® customers started their virtualization
expanding. The four largest software vendors—Microsoft, IBM,
journey with the “easy applications”, such as test/dev environments
SAP, and Oracle—have support statements in place for VMware.
and infrastructure applications. Starting at the low-end of the
VMware is also supported by hundreds of smaller ISVs, and
application spectrum helped customers to minimize risk while
gaining support from many new ISVs each month.
quickly virtualizing 20 percent to 30 percent of their infrastructure.
Beyond that point, customers were often more hesitant to
virtualize their business-critical applications. This reluctance was
fueled primarily by concerns around performance, ISV support,
and the relative risk of deploying an application on a newer,

Introduction
lesser known platform.
Today, customers are moving beyond these traditional
concerns to virtualize their business-critical applications at an
accelerated pace. According to a recent survey, 73 percent of
customers report they virtualize business-critical applications in
production, including SAP, databases, and Microsoft Exchange.
The Virtualization Journey
What has changed? On the one hand, legacy concerns around If you are one of the more than 150,000 companies worldwide
performance and ISV support are no longer warranted. Moreover, that use VMware solutions, you have probably virtualized
customers are realizing that the value of virtualization extends a significant portion of your datacenter. And like most, you
far beyond basic consolidation, and that applications run better probably started your journey by consolidating underutilized
on the VMware private cloud, with faster application life cycle servers supporting smaller low-priority applications.
and improved application quality of service.
You made the right decision. You’ve probably already reduced
Application performance is no longer a barrier to adoption. your infrastructure TCO significantly through server consolidation.
VMware vSphere™ 4 provides outstanding scalability with At the same time, you found that virtualization reduced operational
VMware virtual machines, supporting up to eight virtual CPUs complexity, simplified the lives of administrators and eliminated
and 255GB RAM with minimal virtualization overhead—enough many manual, repetitive tasks. You now can plan capacity at a
to support even large databases. macro-level, provision systems at the touch of a button, and
migrate applications live between hosts. Along with cutting
Consolidation and cost reduction, including infrastructure
annual power consumption by roughly 7,000kWh per consolidated
costs and software licensing costs, are strong drivers for
server, you also reduced the annual carbon dioxide output of
virtualization. ERP systems, email applications, and databases
your data center by four tons of carbon dioxide for each server
consume large pools of over-provisioned servers. Virtualizing
removed. In fact, virtualization may even now be a key
these applications yields consolidation ratios of 5:1 and higher.
component of your company’s energy efficiency strategy.
Through consolidation, customers are able to not only slash
infrastructure costs, but also in many cases achieve 100 percent As your confidence in virtualization grew, so did your desire to
or greater improvement in the utilization of their expensive virtualize a larger portion of your infrastructure. However, when
software licenses. it comes to virtualizing your large, business-critical applications,
you may hesitate. Virtualizing the gears that run your business—
The entire application life cycle, from development to production,
databases, ERP system, email servers, industry-specific solutions,
can be streamlined and accelerated with VMware. Developers
and more—feels like a completely different ballgame, and you
and QA teams can deploy and share development environments
may wonder whether the risk / return ratio is still worth it. In
on the fly. Preconfigured, multitier applications can be deployed
addition, these applications often have powerful “app owners”
in production in a matter of minutes instead of days or even weeks.
that may not be familiar with virtualization and often have their
Application quality of service can be improved by ensuring own specific objections: “will VMware have a negative impact on
performance and availability for all apps. With VMware, IT my application performance?”; “will the ISV give me the support
can monitor service levels, identify bottlenecks, and scale I need?”; “what’s in it for me and my application?”; and, “if it’s
applications dynamically to ensure performance under variable not broken, why change?”.
load. The VMware business continuity capabilities—including

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

While there are certainly specific challenges when it comes to The VMware vCenter Product Family is the industry’s most
virtualizing business-critical applications, the most common advanced virtualization management platform, which unlocks
concerns are actually lingering misperceptions based on the power of virtualization through proactive management and
earlier incarnations of virtualization from years ago. In addition, centralized control of virtual infrastructure. For example, VMware
virtualization is no longer just about consolidation and vCenter AppSpeed enables IT operations to monitor and ensure
cost-savings. Today, advanced VMware customers are using the service levels of distributed multitier applications running
virtualization to transform their IT infrastructure into a private on VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 provides
cloud. Applications really do run better on the VMware private developers and application owners on-demand, self-service
cloud, with much faster dev-test-provisioning cycles, better access to a library of application and development environments
service levels under unpredictable load, and simple, cost- to accelerate develop and test cycles.
effective availability.
With the powerful capabilities of VMware vSphere, the VMware
Join the many VMware customers on the next step of your vCenter Product Family, and a growing ecosystem of over 500
journey to transform your infrastructure into a dynamic private technologies companies, the question has now shifted from
cloud. Run your business-critical applications, including Exchange, “can I virtualize my business-critical apps?” to “can I afford not
SQL, SAP, and Oracle, on VMware vSphere with breakthrough to?”. In this paper, we’ll explain why VMware vSphere is the best
performance and outstanding reliability. Build a flexible cloud platform for delivering business-critical applications. We will
computing infrastructure that can deliver business-critical address each of these six key considerations in order:
applications as dynamic, cost-efficient, and reliable IT services.
• Application performance

VMware vSphere And VMware vCenter • Consolidation and cost reduction

VMware vSphere is the industry’s leading virtualization platform • Delivering applications as a service in the private cloud
for holistically managing large collections of infrastructure— • Accelerating the application life cycle
CPUs, storage, networking—as a seamless, flexible, and dynamic
operating environment. Unlike traditional operating systems that • Guaranteeing application Quality of Service
manage an individual machine, VMware vSphere aggregates • ISV support
the infrastructure of an entire datacenter to create a single
powerhouse with resources that can be allocated quickly and
dynamically to any application in need.
VMware vSphere provides revolutionary benefits, but with
a practical, non-disruptive evolutionary process for legacy
applications. Existing applications can be deployed on VMware Application Performance
vSphere with no changes to the application or the OS they are
running on.
VMware vSphere delivers the performance required to run There are two key performance considerations to keep in mind
business-critical applications in large-scale environments. when virtualizing large resource-intensive applications. First,
VMware vSphere provides 2-4 times the performance of the each individual virtual machine must scale to support the
previous generation platform (VMware Infrastructure 3) while requirements of the application it is hosting. Second, many
keeping virtualization overhead at a very limited at 2-10 percent. applications can actually achieve higher performance on
With these performance numbers, VMware vSphere is able to vSphere than on physical servers, by scaling out on multiple
run even large, resource-intensive databases, and, in many cases, virtual machines to better leverage the capacity of large
enables applications to scale better on newer multicore servers. multicore servers.

VMware vSphere provides a set of application services that

enable applications to achieve unparalleled levels of availability, Virtual Machine Scalability
security, and scalability. For example, with VMware vSphere, all There is still a perception in the market that virtualization
applications can be protected from downtime with VMware High introduces a performance constraint on larger applications,
Availability (HA) and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), without the especially IO-intensive applications such as databases and email
complexity of conventional clustering. In addition, applications servers. This perception was created with early versions of the
can be scaled dynamically to meet changing loads with capabilities VMware hypervisor, VMware ESX®, which did have scalability
such as Hot Add and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). limitations and material overhead. This, however, was multiple
product generations ago.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

As is usually the case, perception lags reality. The latest versions ESX 2 to ESX 4. To put this performance in perspective, a single
of VMware ESX—3.5 and 4—have advanced by leaps and bounds virtual machine today provides about the same performance as a
over the early product generations. VMware has placed a significant Sun Fire 15K in 2002—a very large, multi-million dollar Unix server!
focus on maximizing the performance of virtual machines, and
These advances in performance are charted in Figure 1. And what
as a result, ESX 4 has made tremendous progress in IO, CPU, and
they mean for you is that resource-intensive applications perform
memory scalability over early product generations.
very well on VMware vSphere. In fact, we have measured the
Today, virtual machines on ESX 4 can scale to eight virtual CPUs, resource requirements of more than 700,000 production
256GB of memory, and over 350,000 disk IOPS, while keeping applications running on x86 servers, and VMware vSphere is
overhead limited between 2 and 10 percent for the majority of able to support more than 95 percent of those applications.
applications. That translates to a 20x performance increase from

ESX 2 ESX 3 ESX 3.5 ESX 4

30% - 60% 20% - 30% <10% - 20% <2% - 10% Overhead

1 vCPU 2 vCPU 4 vCPU 8 vCPU CPU

< 4 GB 16 GB 64 GB 255 GB Memory

% of Applications

380 Mb/s 800 Mb/s 9 Gb/s 30 Gb/s Network

< 10,000 20,000 100,000 > 300,000 IOPS

Application Performance Requirements

Source: VMware Capacity Planner assessments

Figure 1. >95 Percent of Applications Match or Exceed Native Performance on VMware

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Better Application Scalability On Multicore Servers an increasingly important problem limiting application scalability
and leading to increased infrastructure costs.
Application scalability has lagged behind the evolution of
high-end multicore servers. In 2005, large quad-socket servers With VMware vSphere, many applications can be scaled out
had a total of 8 processor cores, but fast forward to 2010 and in multiple smaller application instances. Web servers such
large quad-socket servers will have up to 64 processor cores. as Apache of Microsoft IIS, application servers such as Tomcat
How many cores can your applications scale to? Unfortunately, or WebSphere, and even Microsoft Exchange, can easily be
the vast majority of applications cannot come close to using 64 scaled out on multiple virtual machines. This deployment model
cores in parallel. Most applications are only sufficiently multi- enables applications to efficiently use the capacity of large
threaded to efficiently use between 2 to 8 cores in parallel. For multicore servers, while preserving excellent isolation between
example, Microsoft Exchange only scales to 8 cores, the average multiple application instances.
custom application is limited to four processors, and even
Microsoft SQL Server is limited to about 32 cores.

Figure 2. Scaling Applications on VMware vSphere to Leverage Multicore Capacity

Because of these limitations, the traditional deployment model What About Databases?
of “one app per server” limits applications to only scale to a Databases are among the applications that customers are
fraction of server capacity—leaving much of the compute capacity most concerned about on VMware, because of their resource
untapped. For larger CPU-intensive applications, this is becoming requirements and the business-critical nature of these systems.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

These concerns are unwarranted, however, as the capabilities

provided by VMware vSphere are well beyond the needs of Case in point
almost all databases, including Oracle and SQL.
“We have close to 60 Microsoft SQL Servers virtualized,
In February 2009, VMware vSphere set a new benchmark some with a disk usage greater than 90 MB per second,
in virtualized database performance. VMware vSphere was which translates to 22,000 IOPS,” says Tom Gibaud,
benchmarked with one of the most demanding workloads Manager of Information Technology at ViaHealth, a family
for virtualization: a resource-intensive OLTP database based of health care providers in New York state, including
on a fair-use implementation of TPC-C. This application is Rochester General Hospital. “These are SQL Servers that
significantly more resource-intensive than average production touch the patient and have a lot of traffic—if they’re
databases, and hence puts a heavy load on the hypervisor. Even down, it’s a major issue. Having them virtualized on
for this difficult workload, a single virtual machine in VMware VMware gives us greater reliability and more uptime.”
vSphere, running Oracle 11g and Linux, achieved 85 percent of
“We have a VMware-first policy, and have virtualized
native performance with near-linear scalability from one virtual
nearly 90 percent of our application environment,” adds
CPU to eight virtual CPUs. The virtual machine supported 8,900
Gibaud. “That shows how much confidence we have in
transactions per second and drove about 60,000 disk IOPS—a
VMware technology. Simply put, VMware helps us better
massive amount of throughput that only a small fraction of
manage our computing environment. For example, if we
databases actually require.
notice that there is a memory error on a server, it is very
It is true that there are some exceptionally large databases easy for us to vMotion that box somewhere else, replace
out there, but it is the rare database indeed that can exceed the memory chip, and then vMotion it back. Try doing
performance capabilities provided by VMware vSphere. The that with a data center full of physical servers!”
reality is that almost all databases can run quite comfortably on
VMware vSphere, with plenty of processing headroom to spare.
Based on VMware Capacity Planner data compiled from tens of
thousands of production servers in customer environments, the
average production Oracle database requires only a fraction of
the capacity that a virtual machine can deliver.

Figure 3. Average Oracle Database Fits Easily in a Virtual Machine

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

What About SAP? What About Exchange?

Because they use a disproportionate share of datacenter Microsoft Exchange scales extremely well on VMware vSphere.
resources, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications On one hand, a single virtual machine can match the performance
are ideal candidates for consolidation. An average SAP of physical servers and support about 8,000 heavy user mailboxes.
implementation uses about 50 servers, including a high On the other hand, VMware vSphere can more than double the
ratio of non-production servers. VMware delivers the highest performance achieved from physical servers by scaling Exchange
consolidation ratios in the industry for such applications, often out in multiple virtual machines. VMware set a capacity record
exceeding 10:1. Virtualizing this one application saves customers for a single 16-core server running Exchange 2007, doubling the
40 servers or more on average. number of heavy mailboxes supported from 8,000 to 16,000.
The conventional deployment model is to deploy just one Mailbox
SAP software also performs very well on VMware vSphere. Using
Server per physical host. This configuration supports about 8,000
the standard SAP SD benchmark, a virtual machine running 1-4
heavy user mailboxes and scales to about 8 cores. With VMware
virtual CPUs matches the performance of physical servers with
vSphere, Mailbox Servers can be scaled out in multiple virtual
less than 10 percent overhead.
machines per physical host to use all the cores available.

Case in point
Case in point
Checkpoint Systems International, a leading manufacturer
University of Plymouth, one of the UK’s most prominent
of retail tracking, security, and merchandising solutions
universities virtualized 50,000 Exchange 2007 mailboxes
relies on SAP to produce, sell, ship, and invoice its products.
on VMware. “We not only have a more manageable
Checkpoint migrated SAP modules from clustered
and flexible Exchange environment, but we have
physical servers to virtual machines in a phased approach,
replaced Microsoft clustering with VMware’s built-in
culminating in 2007 when they virtualized the two most
high availability solutions such as HA and vMotion. We
critical pieces—the central SAP database and ERP
couldn’t be happier with the uptime and performance
instance. Checkpoint now has 20 SAP servers running on
of our Exchange implementation on VMware. VMware
VMware at its primary site and three VMware hosts at its
technology works for small companies all the way up
secondary site for disaster recovery purposes. With an 8:1
to massive financial institutions. And clearly, it has
server consolidation ratio, Checkpoint has increased
worked for us,” explains Adrian Jane, Infrastructure and
server utilization from 15 to 70 percent, cut power and
Operations Manager.
cooling costs by more than a third, and accelerated
provisioning from four to six weeks before to one hour The benefits go far beyond Exchange performance.
now. Availability is up, and management time is down. Application delivery has accelerated by an order of
magnitude. “In our previous experience with migrating
“Moving our SAP deployment on to VMware has made it
from Exchange 2000 to 2003, the mailbox migrations
easier to deliver a higher level of service to the business
were quite slow,” says Jane. “With the VMware
than was previously possible,” says Michael Nogger,
implementation of Exchange 2007, we found we could
Checkpoint’s IT Operations Manager for Europe. “Our
move between 1,000 and 5,000 mailboxes a night. It was
lives are now significantly easier; we spend far less time
about ten times faster.” Moreover, server provisioning
performing upgrades and maintenance tasks, and our
time went from months to minutes, and disaster recovery
service delivery processes are incredibly streamlined.”
time dropped from weeks to less than an hour.
With VMware, the university has reduced the number of
server racks in its datacenter from 32 to 2, a 93 percent
saving on floor space, and estimates annual savings on
its electricity bill of about $90,000, and a reduction of its
data center output of CO2 by about 170 tons per year.
“VMware is a strategy for us, not a product,” concludes
Jane. “The system manages itself. The IT team and I can
get on with doing things that are much more productive
for the university.”

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Consolidation • Some applications are licensed by “physical CPU”—for example

Oracle databases and Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Per
Processor licenses. Organizations that have multiple instances
of such an application can create a dedicated vSphere cluster
Cost reduction through consolidation remains a strong driver for the application. By licensing all the physical processors in
for virtualization. VMware vSphere delivers huge savings not the cluster, they create an “all you can eat” environment on
only in hardware, power and administrative costs. In January which an unlimited number of instances and virtual machines
2008, CIO Magazine published the results of its “Virtualization can be deployed. Consolidation ratios of 5:1 to 10:1 are common
in the Enterprise” survey of nearly 300 CIOs. When asked why with this approach.
they have virtualized their servers, 81 percent of the companies
responded: “to cut costs via server consolidation.” Consolidation Database Consolidation
ratios of 10:1 or more are common, with some companies
achieving 20:1. That adds up to a lot of savings. Database consolidation is an increasingly popular use case for
VMware vSphere. Nearly all applications require their own database,
These high consolidation ratios are also common with large, and many organizations are faced with spiraling database sprawl
business-critical applications. The 8:1 consolidation ratio and costs. Across the IT industry, Microsoft SQL Server is the
Checkpoint achieved for SAP is typical. Some customers have single largest application in terms of number of x86 servers
gone beyond that, comfortably achieving 10:1 consolidation consumed! Databases also tend to be the most over-provisioned
ratios with SAP. For example, AstraZeneca, one of the world’s applications in the datacenter, and are very expensive due to
leading pharmaceutical companies, consolidated its entire high license costs and top-tier infrastructure requirements.
SAP environment to 50 – 60 virtual machines hosted on six HP
servers, and as a result expects cost savings of more than €1 To control these costs, many organizations have undertaken
million over three years. database consolidation projects. Conventional database
consolidation is typically done by either running multiple SQL
For Exchange, consolidation ratios are usually in the range of or Oracle instances on a shared OS image (multi-instancing),
5:1 to 10:1. Without VMware vSphere, each Exchange server or running multiple databases within a shared SQL or Oracle
role - mailbox server, edge, hub, and client - is deployed on instance (shared instancing). These two traditional approaches
a dedicated server. In addition, there are often dedicated can be successful, but also have significant challenges:
standby servers for availability, as well as multiple Exchange
hubs, creating ample opportunity for high consolidation ratios. • There is generally a lack of OS configuration, security, fault, and
Organizations such as the University of Plymouth, medical resource isolation between database instances—and a single
device manufacturer NuVasive, and packaging manufacturer OS or SQL failure could result in dozens of databases and
Boise have taken advantage of this opportunity to cut down on applications being down simultaneously.
hardware costs and ramp up on efficiency, flexibility, and agility. • Load balancing between physical hosts is a complex undertaking
In many cases, customers are also able to consolidate software that requires re-provisioning databases. A large workload spike
licenses, sometimes by as much as 10:1. on one physical host could result in unacceptable performance
for many databases at the same time.
• Many applications can be licensed by “virtual CPU”, for example
in the case of IBM with the sub-capacity licensing model, or • It can be difficult to guarantee resources to any individual
Microsoft SQL Server Standard Per Processor licenses. In this database. One misbehaving database could hog the resources
case, organizations have the opportunity to license only the of other, more critical databases.
capacity they are effectively using (virtual CPU), as opposed
to the full physical capacity of the server. License consolidation
ratios of 2:1 to 4:1 are common with this model.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

VMware vSphere offers a much simpler and more efficient 3. Resource guarantees: Guarantee and control resources with
alternative. Figure 4 illustrates how some customers choose great precision to ensure that each database delivers its
to have a dedicated database consolidation cluster—similar to required service levels, with no risk of misbehaving databases
what would be done with conventional database consolidation. taking over critical resources from other databases.
However, consolidating databases with VMware vSphere delivers
4. Load balancing: With VMware vSphere, when a host is running
several unique benefits over conventional approaches:
out of capacity, databases can be migrated in real-time and
1. Fast consolidation with P2V: With VMware vSphere, with no downtime to other hosts. This eliminates the need to
consolidating existing legacy databases is simple. Databases over-provision, increases consolidation ratios, while maximizing
can be migrated with a simple physical-to-virtual (P2V) database service levels.
migration, or re-provisioned in a virtual machine with their
existing OS and database configurations. This eliminates Software License Consolidation
the need to re-test and update databases to run on
standardized OS and database configurations. Consolidation can deliver tremendous cost savings not only on
infrastructure, but also on software licenses. Many applications
2. Isolation: Databases consolidated on VMware vSphere
are licensed by physical processor. When processors are utilized
preserve perfect isolation between instances (configuration,
only at 5-15 percent of their capacity, the software licenses are
fault, security, and resource isolation). Databases can run on
also under-utilized at the same levels. For example, this is the
their own OS and SQL version, and a single OS failure will
case for relatively expensive Microsoft SQL Enterprise licenses
only impact a single database. This is an obvious benefit of
(processor licensing), as well as Oracle database licenses.
virtualization, but not possible with conventional database
consolidation approaches. For customers running a relatively large number of these
applications licensed per physical processor, you should consider

Figure 4. vSphere is Ideal Platform for Database Consolidation

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

creating dedicated vSphere clusters for running those applications.

Once all the physical processors have been licensed, you have an “Applications as a Service”
“all you can eat” cluster from a licensing standpoint. By consolidating,
you significantly increase both infrastructure and license utilization.
In The Private Cloud
The example in Figure 5 shows a customer who moved eight
individual databases each running on a dedicated host to one
shared cluster running eight DB instances. With Enterprise Edition, Software development and IT operations are two very different
you only need to license the physical processors—thereby reducing entities. While they have a common objective—to deliver
the required licenses from 16 down to 8, and reducing overall high-quality, dynamic IT services in support of business
costs by more than 70 percent. requirements—they operate at opposite ends of that objective.

Figure 5. SQL/Oracle Server Consolidation Cuts Hardware and Software Costs >50%

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Developers care mostly about building better business • On-demand provisioning of applications in production
functionality faster, while IT administrators care mostly about by creating standard, optimized multitier application
ensuring service levels at the lowest possible cost. Modern configurations (vApps) that can be deployed in a matter
application architectures (SOA, Web services) and frameworks of minutes while eliminating manual provisioning and
(e.g., Java, .NET, Rails, Grails) increase development efficiency configuration of operating systems and applications
dramatically, but IT administrators are having an increasingly
Faster Development and QA With VMware Vcenter
difficult time running these modern applications on rigid,
Lab Manager
inflexible IT infrastructure. Some of the challenges frequently
Modern application frameworks and architectures enable
encountered by IT administrators include:
developers to develop new business functionality faster
• Provisioning an increasingly large number of applications, with than ever before. Unfortunately, the speed of innovation
updates and changes being rolled out faster than ever before is all too often hindered by the rigidity of the underlying
infrastructure. For example, when starting a new application
• Accurate capacity planning to ensure the performance of a
project, developers often have to request a new development
multitude of applications under unpredictable load, without
environment. Provisioning this environment is a process that
over-provisioning and while keeping costs under control
can take days or even weeks, holding back development cycles.
• Ensuring application service levels across distributed, Faced with this challenge, many developers turn to third-
interconnected applications party cloud service providers as an alternative to the internal
infrastructure. Unfortunately, applications developed on third-
• Ensuring application availability across multiple application
party cloud environments can be very difficult to migrate back
tiers and managing multiple app-specific clustering solutions
to the internal infrastructure once they are ready for production.
IT administrators need a better way to build, run and manage
VMware vCenter Lab Manager, part of the VMware vCenter
applications; they need a platform that is as advanced as
Product Family, provides the ideal platform to support modern
the applications being developed. Applications should be
development projects. Lab Manager transforms the internal
provisioned on-demand in the labs and in production, with
development infrastructure into a dynamic, self-service private
guaranteed quality of service, and through a self-service
cloud. Developers can deploy their own pre-configured, multitier
interface accessed directly by application teams.
development stacks (e.g. LAMP stack) in a matter of minutes
VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter provide the ideal through a self-service interface. They can also capture and
platform to develop and run both legacy and next-generation share any system configuration with other members of their
applications: a full set of capabilities and solutions to streamline development team, prototype new applications rapidly, test
the entire “build-run-manage” cycle, bringing down the software releases on a broader range of system configurations
barriers between development and production. With VMware, and capture, reproduce and resolve defects more easily.
application teams and IT administrators are able to accelerate
On-Demand Provisioning With vApp
the application life cycle from development to production, and
Application provisioning can be a cause of major inefficiencies. IT
guarantee application quality of service.
administrators must support the overhead of configuring each
application tier, including the hardware, OS and application. At
Accelerate The Application Lifecycle the same time, configuration errors and configuration drift are
very common, often leading to application downtime. To make
With VMware, the entire application life cycle can be accelerated
matters worse, provisioning isn’t limited to production environments,
and applications can be provisioned on demand, through a self-
but often includes test, development and training systems. Over
service interface, by application owners. VMware vSphere and
time, these systems often fall out of sync with production
the VMware vCenter Product family enable:
systems, resulting in inaccurate testing and QA cycles.
• Faster, more efficient application development through self-
With VMware vSphere, once an app is ready to be rolled out
service developer provisioning of pre-configured development
into production, application teams are able to package the
stacks (e.g. LAMP)
application as a vApp; a golden image of the application that
• Streamlined release cycles by transparently sharing test can be provisioned on demand onto the production infrastructure.
configurations between development, QA, and production. A vApp is essentially a template of a multitier application. It
A production application can be quickly cloned into the labs, includes multiple pre-configured virtual machines containing the
or a new app can be automatically promoted through the different application tiers (e.g., Web, app, database). The virtual
release cycle machines are pre-integrated through network fencing, and the
virtual machine boot sequence can be customized.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

vApp technology dramatically improves provisioning efficiency.

vApps are generated directly by the application teams, ensuring Case in point
that the copy running in production is the optimal configuration.
As a power infrastructure manufacturer, Alstom has
They can be provisioned on demand in a matter of minutes,
built the plants that supply around 20 percent of the
eliminating the weeks of lead time typically required to provision
world’s electrical power—with VMware running in back.
a new application. Different instances of the application remain
“It’s not just about saving money on hardware, but also
identical, eliminating configuration drift. vApps can be cloned
about simplifying things like application provisioning,
from production into the labs in a single operation, to rapidly
maintenance, high availability, and disaster recovery,”
create test environments that are an identical copy to production.
says Dirk Holzwarth, Alstom’s virtualization Team Leader.
“Thanks to VMware, my wife and kids see me more often.”

“VMware obsoletes many manual processes and lets us be Recently, Alstom’s CEO decided he wanted Blackberry
more pro-active and innovative,” says Jay M. Leone, Lab up and running within two months. With physical
Manager for Avaya, a market leader in voice and data infrastructure this would have taken four months - with
technology for the enterprise. “I can’t think of any other VMware, it took only one - and half the staff. The IT team
product, process, or project that has had a greater impact spent a few weeks creating virtual machine templates
in our daily activities. Everything just runs with little that met their requirements and then provisioned
interference. We’ve become hugely reliant on VMware Blackberry from the templates in a matter of hours
to help us test our software better and faster. Ultimately, onto the VMware platform.
we’ve found VMware not only offers invaluable tools, but
“It is important for us to keep operational costs low.
a way of life.”
We have standardized on VMware Infrastructure and its
comprehensive application management toolset to improve
flexibility and maximize operational efficiency,” says Daniel
Liyew, Alstom’s Director, Data Centre Service Line.
Guarantee Application Quality Of Service
Now the company’s IT department is moving to VMware
Ensuring the performance and availability of production applications vSphere 4 with the expectation of even higher efficiency.
is a daunting task. Applications are not always developed “These efficiency gains improve even more with VMware
with scalability, availability and manageability in mind. Yet IT vSphere 4,” continues Liyew, “thanks to features like
administrators are expected to ensure the business’s required VMware Host Profiles and VMware vNetwork Distributed
service levels—for every single application and application tier. Switch. These features will allow us to deploy new
hosts more quickly, achieve standardization, and more
VMware enables IT organizations to ensure application quality
efficiently manage our virtualized environment to reduce
of service (QoS) through effective performance monitoring,
our operational overhead.”
dynamic scalability, and built-in high availability and disaster
recovery for all applications. VMware provides a platform that
can automatically ensure application availability, performance,
and security at the lowest possible cost. VMware vSphere and Right-Size Applications With VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
the VMware vCenter Product Family enable: Sizing applications can be a nightmare. Provide too much
capacity and your costs go through the roof. Provide too little
• Accurate capacity planning for each virtual machine to ensure
capacity and break your service levels. With the growing number
service levels without over-provisioning
of applications to manage, it is increasingly difficult to right-size
• Performance monitoring of multitier applications to quickly capacity to meet service levels while keeping costs under control.
pinpoint performance bottlenecks
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables IT operations to size both
• Dynamic scalability of applications to ensure service levels the underlying physical infrastructure as well as the virtual
under unpredictable or increasing load machines running on the infrastructure. It provides historical
trending data and identifies under- and over-provisioned virtual
• Simple, cost-effective availability for all applications without
machines. For example, IT administrators can identify a virtual
the complexity of clustering
machine that is about to run out of capacity before service
• Automated disaster recovery for all applications levels get impacted. CapacityIQ also identifies underutilized or
idle virtual machines, allowing IT operations to reclaim unused
capacity and minimize costs.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Identify Performance Bottlenecks With VMware Scale Dynamically To Ensure Service Levels
vCenter AppSpeed When performance bottlenecks do occur, it is often necessary to
Even with an optimally sized infrastructure, SLA violations scale an application to restore service levels. Unfortunately, when
are still a fact of life due to unforeseen workload spikes or running on dedicated physical servers, re-sizing applications
performance bottlenecks. Unfortunately, infrastructure teams requires re-provisioning on larger physical hosts, which is a time
typically have limited visibility into the source of bottlenecks, consuming and highly disruptive undertaking. Databases are a
and have many unanswered questions such as “What’s the good example. Administrators have to forecast capacity
infrastructure impact on service levels?” and “What is the source requirements years in advance and translate that estimate into
of performance bottlenecks?” Because of this lack of visibility, system specs, including CPU and memory. If conditions change,
when an end-user complains about slow response times, the the app must be re-provisioned, causing downtime, disruption,
situation often turns into a “finger-pointing game” between and serious unhappiness in the corner offices.
infrastructure and application teams.
VMware vSphere provides a number of capabilities that enable IT
VMware vCenter AppSpeed is a performance monitoring operations to scale applications dynamically:
product optimized for vSphere and designed to end the “finger-
• Hot Add allows IT administrators to increase the capacity of
pointing game.” AppSpeed is delivered as a virtual appliance
a virtual machine with no downtime. For example, a Microsoft
and requires no agents within the virtual machines. It passively
SQL virtual machine could be increased from 2 to 4 virtual
listens to network traffic going through the virtual switching
CPUs and from 4 to 8GB of memory on the fly. Microsoft
infrastructure, and provides the following information to IT
Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 can self-tune for the increased
administrators:
capacity, enabling the new SQL instance to handle more load
• Automatically discovers and maps business services while continuing to meet service levels.
to individual apps, virtual machines, and ESX hosts. IT
• VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enables IT
administrators gain deep visibility into how the different
administrators to perform live migrations of virtual machines
business services relate to the underlying infrastructure.
in a DRS cluster from a small, overutilized host to a larger host
• Monitors end-user service levels including transaction latency, with more available capacity.
throughput, and error rate.
• Finally, if the application can be scaled out (for example in
• Quickly identifies bottlenecks by breaking down the the Web tier) VMware vSphere enables fast provisioning of an
performance of business services to individual applications, additional application instance to handle increased load.
virtual machines, and ESX hosts.

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Protect All Applications With Simple And VMware HA, a feature of VMware vSphere, provides automated
Cost-Effective Availability application restart in the event of ESX host failure or OS failure
Ensuring availability of your applications is difficult. Each within the virtual machine. It is automatically available for any
application component must be made highly available, and application running on VMware vSphere. VMware HA is simple
operations teams often struggle with a proliferation of different and does not require OS or app-level clustering. It is also very
clustering and availability options. The Web tier is fairly simple cost effective because it doesn’t rely on dedicated standby
to protect using network load balancing, the application tier can servers, and in many cases allows the use of lower cost OS and
be clustered, but databases are typically the most difficult tier to application licenses.
protect. Databases can be protected using Microsoft Clustering,
VMware vMotion eliminates planned downtime for host
database mirroring, or high-end options such as Oracle RAC.
maintenance. When maintenance is required on a physical host,
Unfortunately, these solutions are so complex and expensive that
for example for a hardware or BIOS update, all applications can
only the most critical databases tend to be protected—less than
be live migrated to another host for the duration of the maintenance.
10 percent of database instances on average. This is clearly a
problem as 90 percent of databases are vulnerable to unplanned VMware FT protects any application against host failure with
downtime, potentially impacting important business services. continuous availability, without any data loss or downtime.
VMware FT creates virtual machine “pairs” that run in lock step—
VMware provides a range of capabilities that extend availability
essentially mirroring the execution state of a virtual machine. To
to 100 percent of applications, without the complexity or cost of
the external world they appear as one instance (one IP address,
clustering (see Figure 6).
one application)—but they are fully redundant instances.

Figure 6. Transforming availability service levels for databases

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Automated Disaster Recovery For All Applications

Disaster Recovery is inherently simpler with VMware. Once an ISV Support
application is virtualized, it is encapsulated in a virtual machine
and abstracted from the underlying hardware. Virtual machines
are easy to replicate to a failover site, and can be launched on As the industry standard for virtualization, VMware vSphere has
any available ESX host—eliminating the need to have dedicated received strong ISV support. Today we have support statements
standby hardware in the failover site. in place from the four largest ISVs: Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and
Oracle. In addition, hundreds of smaller ISVs officially support
VMware Site Recovery Manager 4 accelerates recovery and
VMware, such as Cerner, Sybase, Tibco, and many others. The
ensures successful recovery by automating the recovery process
list of ISVs with official support for VMware is expanding rapidly
and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing
with dozens of new ISVs each month.
recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager eliminates complex
manual recovery steps and removes the risk and worry from VMware vSphere is transparent to applications and does not
disaster recovery. introduce functional changes. Hence, many of our customers
choose to run their applications on vSphere even without
official support statements from ISVs. In these situations, the
Case in point vast majority of ISVs still choose to provide the level of support
required by customers. Worst case, some ISVs might require that
Campbell Clinic, a 400-person healthcare provider, had
problems be reproduced on physical servers prior to providing
already implemented VMware Infrastructure 3 for the
support. This is an option that is seldom applied in practice. If
consolidation benefits; “We’ve virtualized everything
in doubt, ask your ISV how many times they have requested
from Exchange to SQL to SharePoint,” says Justin Lauer,
“physical re-production,” and how many bugs they found to be
Campbell Clinic’s IT Manager, “and in doing so, we’ve
related to ESX. For most ISVs, the answer is zero!
been able to nearly halve our total number of boxes.”
When vSphere 4 launched, Campbell Clinic migrated its
production applications, including most of its business- Specific ISV Statements
critical healthcare applications that provide access to Microsoft Support
patient medical records and surgery-center practice Back in August 2008, ESX 3.5 became the industry’s first third-party
management systems, to the latest platform. hypervisor to be validated under Microsoft’s Server Virtualization
Campbell Clinic is also leveraging VMware vSphere Data Validation Program. This means that VMware is now certified and
Recovery to provide quick, simple, and cost-effective officially supported for Windows and 31 applications, including
backup and recovery. “For smaller businesses with finite Exchange 2007, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint 2007, and Dynamics
IT resources, simplicity becomes a critical requirement, CRM 4.0. Customers running these applications on VMware are
which is something VMware understands,” says Lauer. guaranteed to receive collaborative support from Microsoft and
“With the new VMware Fault Tolerance in VMware vSphere VMware in the event of problems.
4, we can provide zero downtime, with continuous Microsoft has also removed the “vMotion tax.” In the past, licenses
protection against hardware failures. Unlike clustering could not be moved between hosts more than once every 90 days
software, VMware FT did not require application-level without incurring a cost penalty, making it very difficult to take
customization and my staff was able to configure it with advantage of VMware vMotion. Microsoft lifted this restriction,
a couple of mouse clicks. freeing customers to use vMotion with Microsoft applications as
“If our applications go down, our doctors will not be able frequently as desired without paying a licensing penalty.
to access the information they need to treat patients,” Additional Microsoft support documentation can be found at
adds Lauer. “Our business would effectively shut down. these locations:
We have enabled VMware Fault Tolerance for these
virtual machines, giving us peace of mind that our critical • http://support.microsoft.com/?id=897615
workloads will not experience any service interruption if • http://support.microsoft.com/?id=956893
the hardware fails.”
• http://windowsservercatalog.com/svvp
• http://support.microsoft.com/?id=957006

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 Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Oracle Support
Although some Oracle marketing documents imply that Oracle Conclusion
does not support VMware, and Oracle sales might tell you that
VMware is not supported, we are pleased to clarify that Oracle
does have a support statement in place for VMware. Oracle’s Business agility depends on IT agility, and VMware vSphere
Metalink note 249212.1, published on MyOracleSupport, defines enables IT to deliver. By standardizing on the vSphere internal
Oracle’s policy for supporting applications on VMware. This cloud to virtualize 100 percent of your applications, you can
support policy is very similar to the types of support provided reduce capital and operational costs by 50 percent, while
by other ISVs. And just like at other ISVs, Oracle’s known bug providing a more dynamic platform for applications that
repository, Metalink, has not had a single ESX related issue streamlines the entire “build-run-manage” application cycle.
logged in more than three years. Based on our experience
While virtualizing business-critical applications presents
with many VMware customers running Oracle in production
some unique challenges, the main legacy concerns around
on VMware, what it comes down to is that Oracle’s support
virtualization—specifically performance and ISV support—are a
organization will support you when you call.
thing of the past. Application performance has improved steadily
Here are the facts from Oracle’s statement: with multiple product generations, and with VMware vSphere,
there is practically no application that cannot be virtualized from
• Oracle will accepts Support Requests on VMware for bugs
a performance standpoint. The four largest ISVs—Microsoft, IBM,
already known to Oracle
SAP, and Oracle—have support statements in place for VMware.
• Oracle may accept Support Requests on VMware for bugs that VMware is also supported by hundreds of smaller ISVs, and
are not seen by Oracle as being caused by virtualization gaining support from tens of new ISVs each month.
• Oracle maintains the right to require physical reproduction if With VMware vSphere, applications can be delivered as
they suspect VMware is “at fault” (though rarely enforced) dynamic IT services on the internal cloud. Developer efficiency
is increasing dramatically with modern application architectures
• Oracle RAC is the only product that is “expressly not supported”
and frameworks, but IT is having an increasingly difficult time
on VMware
delivering these modern applications on rigid, inflexible IT
infrastructure. VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter provide
the ideal platform to develop and run both legacy and next-
generation applications: a full set of capabilities and solutions
to streamline the entire “build-run-manage” cycle, bringing
down the barriers between development and production. With
VMware, application teams and IT organizations can accelerate
the application life cycle from development to production, and
guarantee application quality of service.
Now is the time to join the many VMware customers on the
next step of your journey to transform your infrastructure into a
dynamic internal cloud. Run your business-critical applications,
including Exchange, SQL, SAP, and Oracle, on VMware vSphere
with breakthrough performance and outstanding reliability.
Build a flexible cloud computing infrastructure that can deliver
business-critical applications as dynamic, cost-efficient, and
reliable IT services.

.
Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be
trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW_10Q1_WP_vSPHERE_USLET_EN_R6
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