Cloud computing is the antidote to inflexible, overly complex IT infrastructures. It’s not an end state you can jump to instantaneously, but a transition achieved in stages. To guide and assist you on your path, VMware provides The VMware Journey, a proven and practical implementation roadmap designed to deliver benefits as you go.

During each phase, IT becomes more agile, responsive, and efficient; ROI increases while IT costs go down. The journey culminates in a cloud that is uniquely yours—a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment perfectly aligned with your individual business needs and goals.

Phase 1: IT Production

In the first phase of the Journey, IT virtualizes production workloads as well as development, testing and staging environments, consolidating servers to increase utilization and reduce costs. Storage, computing, and network resources are pooled into streamlined and flexible “virtual compute clusters” to deliver further efficiency gains.

Higher Efficiency and Lower Costs

The primary focus of this phase is enhancing infrastructure efficiency. The initiative to virtualize IT Production workloads generally comes from within the IT organization, driven by a desire to reduce the cost of hardware, power, cooling, and physical space. VMware virtualization is applied to IT-owned workloads with relatively uncomplicated governance models such as file, print, DNS servers, internet load-balancing services and simple applications with small-footprint databases instances.

Early Cloud Adoption to Drive Greater Value

Even in this initial phase, the enterprise can supplement datacenter resources by moving selected workloads, such as test and development and pre-production QA, to one of the many compatible and secure public clouds offered worldwide by VMware vCloud™ partners.

In fact, recent VMware research shows that customers who implement cloud capabilities sooner—during this first phase of the Journey—significantly amplify efficiency gains, lower their costs, and improve IT agility and business responsiveness. Early adoption also gives the enterprise hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure operations, enabling IT to reliably plan for more widespread cloud deployments later on.

The first phase of the Journey provides these tangible and measurable benefits:

• Higher utilization of existing resources
• Reduced IT complexity
• Greater efficiency and flexibility through resource pooling and elastic capacity
• Improved application performance and scalability
• Delay or avoidance of major capital investments
• Significant savings in operational and maintenance costs

• Download Business & Financial Benefits of Virtualization Whitepaper