VMware

Application Platform for Your Business Needs

While a reliable, industry-proven hypervisor is a critical foundation for a virtualized cloud infrastructure, it does not constitute a complete solution by itself. You need an overall “shared IT services platform” that delivers the right infrastructure and application services for running your business. This platform must have built-in aggregation, migration, allocation, power management, and availability services. Only VMware vSphere delivers all of these built-in services for a cloud infrastructure. Other offerings are incomplete and fall short of delivering the entire solution.

Learn more about how VMware vSphere delivers these services that are critical for running business applications in a virtualized datacenter.

Live Server and Storage Migration: Transparent Agility

" I wouldn’t put my mission-critical systems on a virtualization solution like Microsoft Hyper-V, which is dependent on an operating system. We all know the track record of operating systems with patches and vulnerabilities. And other virtualization products lack the complete toolset that you get from VMware, including capabilities like live migration. The tools that VMware offers allow us to be more productive, as well as offer higher SLAs to our application owners. We couldn’t do without it. "

— Tom Gibaud, Manager of Information Technology, ViaHealth / Rochester General Hospital

Virtualization without live migration limits how dynamic and agile your IT can really be because it is a core enabler for a Shared IT Services Platform. It eliminates all application downtime and visible disruptions to the end-user when virtual machines are moved from one server to another or from one storage array to another.

VMware invented live virtual machine migration with VMware VMotion in 2003 and datacenters have never been the same since. In 2006, VMware further extended its leadership by releasing Storage VMotion, which enables live migration of virtual machine files from storage array-to-array with no end-user visible interruptions. With the high attach rate of shared storage to virtualized servers, transparent migration of VM files from one array to another is critical. No other virtualization platform vendor delivers anything comparable to VMware Storage VMotion today.

Watch a technical video on: Enhancedc Storage vMotion and VMware vSphere

With VMotion and Storage VMotion, IT administrators can perform crucial tasks like planned maintenance and automated load balancing during normal business hours. There is no further need for costly overtime pay (evenings, weekends) or hours spent scheduling maintenance windows with application owners. Workers stay productive without any disruption to their day-to-day work and IT administrators get their nights and weekends back.

See how VMotion and Storage VMotion can save $58,500 and $68,750 (per year respectively, in a 150 VM environment.


Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V lacks both server-to-server and array-to-array live migration capabilities and therefore cannot eliminate application downtime. To enable hardware maintenance, virtual machine migrations with Microsoft’s platform must be scheduled after business hours or during weekends (overtime) to minimize impact to the end-users.

Without live migration, a basic, common task such as planned maintenance of servers and shared storage creates unacceptable end-user disruptions. See an example of this disruption as caused by Microsoft’s Quick Migration—a Microsoft VM migration offering that involves downtime.

Features VMware vSphere with vCenter Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V with System Center Citrix XenServer with Essentials Enterprise
Live Virtual Machine Migration for Zero Application Downtime
Zero Application Downtime ‘Maintenance Mode’ for Patching Servers
Maintenance Mode with Dynamic Workload Placement
Maintenance Mode with Flexible Automation Rules
Live Storage Migration

Next Steps

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