Icomm offers credible hands-on experience and consultancy in this environment that can facilitate greater understanding and adoption by public or private organisations.

An initial consultation enables us to understand your 'pain points' before conducting a detailed capacity planning assessment. This software based exercise identifies where improvements can be made in your estate.

Icomm then works with you to develop an appropriate proposal that meets your budget and objectives - whether that means recycling and cutting down your existing server estate with virtualisation or implementing new physical servers plus virtualisation.

Our VMware Enterprise Partner status enables us to secure the best licence prices combined with cutting edge HP servers and switches.

If virtualised storage is demanded we would propose a best-of-breed NetApp Storage Area Network to best leverage the added functionality afforded by virtualised servers. Sharing and consolidating storage simplifies storage administration and reduces storage costs. It also unlocks potential for improved Disaster Recovery with capabilities for off-site replication. This can in turn facilitate quicker recovery time objectives and improved business continuity.

Icomm's unprecedented technical service excellence will install the solution, migrate applications if required as well as train and hand-over management to your in-house team. Alternatively, we can offer fully pro-active support to ensure smooth operation ongoing.

Leveraging the benefits of Virtualisation with SANs

To take full advantage of all the benefits associated with server virtualisation any infrastructure transformation strategy must consider the economic consolidation of disk arrays.

Without a shared storage SAN deployment, each virtual machine is 'trapped' on the server it is running on, particularly from the data perspective, and many of the advantages of virtualisation such as High Availability, Live Migration and Dynamic Load Distribution cannot be achieved. Sharing and consolidating storage usually simplifies storage administration, but also reduces storage costs.

For this reason, Icomm would strongly recommend a SAN for anything other than a very small deployment.

SAN Benefits are widespread, and include the ability to allow virtual servers to even boot from the SAN itself. This allows for a quick and easy replacement of faulty host servers. SANs also tend to enable more effective, quicker and smarter backup and Disaster Recovery processes.

What is Virtualisation?

Virtualisation is a software technology designed to let you run multiple virtual machines with different operating systems on a single physical machine. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer except it is composed entirely of software with no hardware components whatsoever.

Traditionally, the practice was that software and hardware were intrinsically linked, and a server existed to perform a singular purpose, resulting in some servers costing a lot of money and being worked hard and others completely underutilised.

Virtualisation is a term that describes the act of creating a simulated (or virtual) computer hardware environment and depositing within it an Operating System and business applications. This abstract container is called a 'Virtual Machine'. Through Virtualisation, former physical servers (or Hosts) are able to form 'clusters' and pool physical resources to one machine.

• View full details of VMWare solutions

Go to Server Virtualisation Resource