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Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications within your environment. The old “one server, one application” model forces IT to spend more time managing servers than creating more innovative and collaborative solutions. Virtualization can save customers a significant amount of their IT budget by consolidating resource pools and delivering highly available systems. Overall the benefits are:

Ø  Reduce costs from both hardware and operational costs while reducing administrative overhead

Ø  Ensure applications perform with the highest availability and performance

Ø  Ensure business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions

Ø  Improve desktop management with faster deployment of desktops and their applications while reducing support calls

Agility and consistent performance are key to any competitive advantage strategy. Virtualization is a part of the overall roadmap for Infrastructure Optimization.

Microsoft provides a complete suite of technologies to enable an integrated, end-to-end, virtualized infrastructure. Using products that span the desktop to the data center, you can bring capacities online in real-time, as needed; streamline and provision applications, services and data on-demand; accelerate backup and recovery, and enhance availability so that your users are protected against system failure and service interruptions.

Today, Microsoft's virtualization toolset for the data center includes Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which consolidates server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine. On the desktop side, we offer Microsoft Terminal Services, which virtualizes the presentation of entire desktops or specific applications; Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V), which transforms applications into centrally-managed virtual services that are never installed and don't conflict with other applications; Microsoft VDI, which allows customers to centralize the storage, execution, and management of a Windows desktop in the data center; and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V, formerly Kidaro) which, with Virtual PC, enables client-hosted desktop virtualization, where you can deploy and centrally manage VMs on Windows desktops while providing a seamless user experience. To simplify management of your entire infrastructure, Microsoft System Center lets you manage both physical and virtual assets for clients and servers, including multiple hypervisors, all with the same platform.

System Center provides you with one system to manage physical and virtual assets across the full application and OS stack, including multiple hypervisors (from Microsoft, as well as from Citrix and VMware). It lets you manage your virtual and physical environments with the same levels of specificity, and uses common deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and backup methodologies across both.

Attain can help you design and implement virtualization solutions for your infrastructure and application environment. Give us a call…we can implement your vision of an Optimized Infrastructure environment!  

For more information on Microsoft’s Virtualization, click on the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/default.mspx