The Value Of Virtualization And Cloud Computing

The Value Of Virtualization And Cloud Computing

By Manny Vergara

Smashwords - Edition

Copyright 2013 Manny Vergara

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table Of Contents

Why I Wrote This Book For You?

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Chapter 1: The Evolution Of Virtualization

Chapter 2: The Value Of Virtualization

Chapter 3: The Framework For Transforming Your Virtual Data Center

Chapter 4: Preparing Your Business Case For Your Virtualization Project

Chapter 5: Innovate Your Data Center Into Cloud Computing To Generate Revenues

Chapter 6: Benefits Of End User Computing – Virtual Desktops

Chapter 7: The Value of SDDC – Software Defined Data Center

Chapter 8: How To Prepare Your ROI/TCO To Justify Your Virtualization Project

Chapter 9: IT Governance, Risk And Compliance In Cloud Computing

Chapter 10: The Future Of Software Defined Networking

Chapter 11: VMware’s Partner Enablement – Recommendations For Success

Chapter 12: Cloud Computing Infrastructure Security – Best Practices

Why I Wrote This Book For You?

Welcome to the exciting world of virtualization and cloud computing. You have picked this book because you want to get a new fresh look at the value of virtualization and cloud computing to simplify, automate and generate new revenue’s growth in your data center as you continue your ‘Journey to the Cloud’.

I wrote this book with you in mind to help you close the gap between your business needs and the ability to justify the business value to implement projects in virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing to increase revenues in the data center. So, how do you begin the business case to measure results before your invest in new technologies? I am going to show you step-by-step how to build your business case using real business case scenarios to assist you better. There are many hardware vendors in today’s market saying they have the best cloud solution for you. But how do you know if they are really offering the right solution for you or not? It is important to make the right distinction and align your business goals and objectives with VMware, the leader in the virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing to accelerate your business growth.

Your data center is eligible to be transformed from cost center into profit center. Yes, profit center. In this book, I will explain how to accelerate your business’s growth to increase your profits by using business case templates, new techniques for creating ROI/TCO analyses and identifying new opportunities for process improvement to generate business agility effectively. In addition, we will review the details to transform the user’s desktop experience into a user’s virtual desktop online by bringing your own device (BYOD) experience.

VMware offers software defined data center to automate your software development life cycle (SDLC), business critical applications, information security and virtual desktop infrastructure. We are going to review the benefits of transforming your data center into software defined data center (SDDC) to increase business agility through the provisioning of virtual computer, storage and network resources on-demand for your business critical applications and end users, consumers of cloud computing resources. This means that companies can run their business operations more efficient to accelerate productivity. In addition, CAPEX and OPEX can be reduced to new low levels to help you increase profits and streamline the current process cycle time to produce more with fewer resources.

Having a primary and secondary data center are essentials requirements for maintaining business continuity in case natural or human made disaster occur. In this book, I explain the importance to protect your business at all times and recover in just a few minutes using VMware’s Site Recovery Manager product in the data center.

This book also explains the importance to go beyond the traditional sales pitch or power point presentation to clients before delivering the proposal document. It prepares you to ask the right questions before meeting with your customers to understand the business core strategies, current business issues and operations. The value proposition is drafted according to their business needs before providing the right solution to earn customer trust and achieve total customer satisfaction. Many customers expect you to deliver the entire business proposition information including: the business case document, ROI/TCO analyses, business process flow diagram, industry’s benchmark analysis to earn their business. Together, we will review how you can present your sales proposal documentation effectively to demonstrate why VMware’s solutions are better than the competition.

The goal of this book is to gain a better understanding of business best practices to deliver effective business proposition to your customers. The CFO and CIO expect more than just a proposal. They expect a bulletproof proposal document ready to answer the virtualization and cloud computing values including prices, project roadmap, solution design and ROI analysis. I provide several examples of business case scenarios from companies like MaxTelecom and ACME Enterprises to illustrate the how to prepare a complete proposal based on their business challenges in their industries and how senior executives were able to transform their data centers into profit centers. We are going to review their new data center architecture diagram to help you with the business case document similar to their business environments.

This is an exciting moment for companies to implement virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing projects to accelerate business’s growth as customers automate their manual process in the data center using vSOM, Horizon Suite and vCloud Suite products from VMware. I have highlighted the steps to prepare the project plan phases to ensure a complete success in your journey to the cloud computing projects. As you read the different chapters in this book, you will find that there are excellent training material, business case scenarios examples and abundance of information about new concepts in software defined data center, IT governance, journey to the cloud, network security, IT controls framework and storage virtualization. The end user computing solution, also known as desktop virtualization, is described in this book. VMware solutions pave the way to generate new cost-savings in desktop virtualization by abstracting, pooling and automating the computing resources management to increasing business agility and productivity.

We live in a dynamic world where end users require access to the Internet 24/7 from anywhere using their own personal devices including (iPADs, Tablets-PC, Smartphones, laptops) online. In chapter six I explain the concept of end user computing in more details to explore how users can access their virtual machines, virtual applications and personal files from any Internet browser securely thanks to VMware’s horizon suite product.

I also explain the best business practices to protect your network from computer hackers using sniffing tools and how to create new layers of network security using software defined networking such as the vCloud network and security (vCNS) product from VMware. The vCNS safeguards your data traffic and isolates specific domains networks. It uses the ‘edge gateway’, soft-switch to configure your network firewall rules, dhcp, nat, vpn, load balancing and high availability internally to protect and route the data traffic through your VLAN, port groups and VXLAN encapsulation to L2 and L3 layers more effective instead of using expensive network hardware appliances. There is also a chapter dedicated to VMware’s partner enablement and recommendations that show how exciting is for VMware partners to promote their ‘VMware’s technologies center’ using the HOL (hands On-Labs) online to their customers from their offices. Partners have access to the right information from VMware partner central site to generate sales leads, opportunities and how partners can create more business revenues based on sales incentives to increase their sales.

I hope you enjoy this book as much I have enjoyed put it all together for you. Please refer other colleagues, friends at work, family members, your neighbor, technology vendors and college students to read this book to understand the challenges and opportunities to generate new profits in today’s virtualization and cloud computing through VMware solutions.

Acknowledgement

This book is dedicated to all VMware colleagues and friends for their contributions, professionalism, charisma and passion for virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing. Thanks to the VMware management team for their dedicated leadership and support to ensure that our systems engineers team has the latest tools and knowledge available to meet and exceed customer’s expectations in our regions.

Thanks to my wife and daughter for their support and long hours while I was writing this book and to all our VMware customers who have come to us and asked technical questions to resolve their business challenges and current issues in their data center. Thanks to our users’ communities in socialcast who have challenged us with technical questions about VMware virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing solutions to satisfy our customer’s business needs. Thank you for making me a better system engineer at VMware.

As Keynote speaker at VMware, I have the opportunity to meet new and existing customers with different business challenges, knowledge backgrounds in need to know more about VMware’s virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing solutions from Latin America and North American regions. During my conferences, I have learned a great deal of information from customer everyday. Thanks to their questions, I have been inspired to write this book to provide you the best approach to answer the frequent questions to justify their investment with VMware solutions and how our solutions fit your business model to accelerate your business’s growth, increase revenues and automate your data center. Customers have given me the inspiration to write this book and the opportunity to assist them to speed-up the learning curve and maturity about our VMware solutions and how to apply the know-how as they continue in the journey to cloud to increase business agility and reduce capital and operating expenses.

I would also like to thanks the following contributors:

Sean P. Conroy – History of Virtualization.

VMware’s technical writers team in virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing.

KPMG IT Governance and Risk Management Methodology Management.

Gartner Analytics.

Google Benchmark Analysis.

Follow us in Facebook: http://facebook.com/valueof.virtualization

Share this book with friends, colleagues, partners and customers to assist them better.

About the Author

Manny Vergara

VMware - Sr. vCloud Engineer

VCP5-Cloud, CCNP, NCIE, CSE, CISSP, PMP, Six-Sigma, MBA

Manny is a dynamic business executive oriented to technical solutions in VMware; a certified specialist in virtualization, cloud computing, software defined data center (SDDC), Cisco networks, network security, business applications and NetApp Storage with experience in international regions available to deliver customer expectations. Manny is always ready to assist companies to accelerate their revenue’s growth, deliver ROI/TCO analyses and offer the best business practices in the industry. He speaks English, Portuguese, and Spanish fluently and has international business experience abroad in the Americas, Latin America, Europe and Middle East regions.

Manny was born in Panama and had lived in the U.S. for the last twenty years. He has more than fifteen years experience in information technology and he is currently a keynote speaker for VMware events, virtual Seminars to demonstrate the benefits of VMware SDDC - software defined data center, software defined networking, desktop virtualization, vCloud private, hybrid, private solutions. Manny is currently assisting clients to increase VMware's knowledge about latest products and services. He shows customers how to transform their data centers from cost centers to profit centers, into ITaaS (IT as a Services) in private, hybrid and public cloud computing environments. He helps companies to generate business value, agility by improving their existing business cycle, TTM (Time to market), high-availability of computing, network and storage resources through virtualization, using ROI/TCO analyses and demonstrate customers how to speed up, simplify and automate business processes.

Manny develops the virtual data center architect and implements the network and storage topologies for end clients to deliver new VMware vClouds (Hybrid, Private, Public) and the know-how to simplify, automate tasks in the data center. He also promotes process optimization to ensure that end customers receive speed in vClouds Services On-Demand, High Availability, Simplification and Automation for data centers after the project has been implemented.

Chapter 1

The Evolution of Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Since the beginning of the Internet era, the PC computer took a dramatic change to speed up the information revolution as we continued to discover new technologies in the world of virtualization. Today, the concept of PC has been stretched, and has created new markets in terms of mobility, simplicity, security, and flexibility that have become part of our routine life. As we continue embracing new technological changes, I ask a simple question: Are you prepared for Life after PC windows? For many years, we have recognized that the PC (personal computer) has become our personal information repository that allows communicating, storing and collaborating information with other people. We live in a world of Internet and a mobile age also known as the Post-PC era, where devices like PC tablets, iPads, Smart Phones, iPhone, Android, Laptops and desktops are available, anytime, anywhere to access personal information as long as we have Internet access via Wi-Fi, LAN connectivity.

Today, most companies agree that buying a PC without support is not the smartest decision for their users. Why? Well, because, companies need to be productive 24/7 in real-time to allow information access anywhere, anytime through the Internet. With the new generations of mobile users using email, chat rooms, videos and texting from their personal devices, new users are speeding up the demand for information and media. This trend is transforming our lives and the way that we make decisions instantly.

Thanks to virtualization technologies, PCs can be virtualized (encapsulated) into software files including configuration, disk, BIOS, characteristics, logs, snap and swap file and run from any mobile device. There is no need to wait for the tech support to look at your computer and fix the operating system, or install a new software patch in the hard drive or install a new corporate software in hundreds of computers. Those days are gone for some companies that are enjoying the benefits of virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing solutions.

A few years ago, I performed IT consulting auditing for a company in Seattle where they hired IT staff to perform upgrades of patches and install new Windows O/S upgrades to Windows 7 to more than 300 hundreds users. It took them six weeks to upgrade the hardware laptop and software installations. Can you imagine the amount of productivity downtime wasted per each user? Users didn’t have access emails, Internet, while customer’s orders were on hold because of their PC upgrade. Users didn’t have access to their personal files in the share drives, business applications and some projects were on hold for weeks just because a group of IT staff were upgrading their laptops and PCs to run faster in the internet. This company did not grasp virtualization very well, and preferred to run its IT department in the old fashion by offering IT support to each PC user in the company. As you can imagine, this decision increased operating expenses because they had to hire five resources to do the work in those six weeks.

Users can now access the virtual machine (PC encapsulation files) from the Internet anywhere, anytime from any mobile device and with their VPN security in place. This means, that the user only need to have browser (firefox, explorer, safari, chrome) username and password and secure internet connection (VPN) to access the personal files, applications and virtual machines online.

VMware, for many years, has become the leader in server virtualization, end user computing and cloud computing, also called Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). It uses the best technologies to simplify, abstract, pool, and automate computing resources including (cpus, ram, storage, network) to provide virtualization in a form of infrastructure as a service, on-demand for organizations and group of users. Virtualization allows computer resources to be distributed and allocated to multiple servers in a cluster to offer the best performance for business applications. As the number of