Overview
VMware and IBM share a large intersection of joint customers. Together, IBM and VMware offer simplified deployment and lowered operational costs, allowing customers to implement a flexible and scalable computing environment that helps drive their business objectives. VMware's alliance with IBM cuts across all IBM's key businesses: software, hardware and services.
VMware and IBM Software are working together to simplify deployment of IBM solutions and IBM Middleware on VMware virtual infrastructure. Benchmarks, deployment guides, reference configurations and customer references are in various stages of completion across the IBM Software brands. Read on to learn more how you can gain the benefits of combining industry-leading VMware virtualization with the critical functionality of IBM Software solutions.
IBM Software CTO Anant Jhingran speaks about IBM and virtualization 
Proven Solutions for Business Critical Environments
Rock-solid reliability and stability.
IBM and VMware have conducted extensive testing of Data Management products on VMware Infrastructure. The tested products have demonstrated remarkable stability running on VMware, and interoperate flawlessly with advanced VMware capabilities such as VMotion and cloning.
Support demanding performance requirements.
IBM Data Management products, and in particular IBM DB2, meet the performance requirements of demanding, business critical environments when running on VMware Infrastructure. As demonstrated in joint testing, a single VMware Virtual Machine can scale to deliver more than 80% of the capacity of a physical server. With the improvement in x86 volume servers, and ESX scaling up to 4 physical processors, 64 GB of memory, and 100,000 IO Operations Per Second, each Virtual Machine provides sufficient performance to host more than 95% of production database instances. Only the most demanding databases need to be further analyzed and tuned for performance prior to virtualization.
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View more details on joint scalability testing of DB2 on VMware
Accelerate Time-To-Value
Deploy Data Management Virtual Appliances in minutes
IBM and VMware have developed several Information On Demand Virtual Appliances containing a suite of Data Management products that are pre-installed, pre-configured, and ready to be deployed in minutes. For example, the Business Intelligence appliance packages Cognos with DB2 to deliver a fully functional, pre-configured Business Intelligence solution. These Virtual Appliances accelerate Time-To-Value by eliminating the need for complex, expensive, lengthy, and error prone installation and configuration cycles.
Streamline testing and provisioning of Data Management products and related multi-tier applications
IT administrators are faced with an increasing volume of applications that must be deployed at an accelerated pace. Modern applications are moving to distributed architectures, themselves containing many application components undergoing more rapid change cycles. Each of these changes must be tested and then provisioned into production. IT administrators can use VMware Infrastructure to streamline the testing and provisioning of IBM Data Management products as well as multi-tier applications that incorporate these products.
VMware snapshots and clones can be used to quickly reproduce an exact copy of multi-tier production applications in the labs. Applications can be tested more accurately in an identical context to the production environments. A larger number of tests can be conducted in a shorter time window by re-provisioning application clones in minutes in between tests.
Provisioning a new application into production typically requires multiple months of lead time to order the hardware, rack and stack it, install and configure the OS and networking connections, and finally provision the application. With VMware, provisioning lead times can be reduced to minutes by simply provisioning a new instance from Virtual Machine templates, which contain a preconfigured operating system along with the application and all the latest patches, onto the existing Virtual Infrastructure.
Simplify Infrastructure
Eliminate planned downtime for infrastructure maintenance
Planned downtime for infrastructure maintenance is typically highly disruptive to IT operations, and one of the leading causes of application downtime. Administrators have to negotiate maintenance windows days in advance and perform maintenance at inconvenient times, when the business can tolerate the disruption.
VMware VMotion™ can be used to eliminate planned downtime for IBM Data Management products. With VMotion, applications running in Virtual Machines can be migrated live from one physical server to another without impacting application availability. Administrators can use VMotion to perform infrastructure maintenance at any time, eliminating the need to negotiate time windows for shutting down applications.
Right-size infrastructure for today’s needs with dynamic resource allocation
Databases are always challenging to size, and predicting how much load is going to hit each database is a very imprecise undertaking. Once a database is deployed in production on a physical server, moving it to a larger system can be highly disruptive. Hence databases are often deployed with plenty of unused spare capacity as a ‘security margin’ to meet unexpected future loads without the need to re-provision the database.
The dynamic resource allocation capabilities of VMware Infrastructure enable administrators to reduce spare capacity and right-size databases for today’s needs, while keeping the flexibility to quickly adjust resources in the future to meet unpredictable or changing load. Administrators can adjust capacity in minutes by re-sizing a Virtual Machine, moving a Virtual Machine to a more powerful server, or deploying a new database instance from a Virtual Machine template.
Consolidate Tier 2 Databases Simply and Efficiently
Tier 2 databases, which play a critical functional role but with limited performance and throughput requirement, are very common in production. These databases are typically deployed on dedicated physical servers, yet only require a fraction of their capacity. They can easily be consolidated onto shared physical servers with VMware Infrastructure, drastically reducing the number of physical servers required to host them. At the same time, these databases can benefit significantly from built-in VMware capabilities including High Availability and Disaster Recovery, protecting all tier 2 database instances with simple and cost-effective availability solutions.
