Virtualization and Workload Management

Is your data center fully optimized and balanced? Are you maximizing your ROI? Although most modern servers can handle 20 or more virtual machines, average server consolidation ratios are often less than 10-to-1.

PlateSpin® workload management solutions from Novell help you take advantage of the efficiency and cost benefits of today's virtualization technology. We simplify the ongoing management of your heterogeneous virtual environment so you see a better return on your IT investment.

Our solutions provide unparalleled capabilities in:

• Virtual capacity management
• Virtual machine management

Virtual capacity management capabilities leverage your IT resources by closely and continuously monitoring your virtual environment. Our technologies identify any configuration issues that affect performance or efficient server allocation, as well as how and when your virtual resources are being used, and by which virtual machines and applications. Just as importantly, you'll know which resources and virtual machines aren't being used, so you can re-allocate your valuable resources. You can maximize data center utility by migrating resource-constrained workloads to another virtual host or even back to a dedicated physical server. Most importantly, proper workload balance delivers both optimum efficiency and maximum ROI. Virtual capacity management helps defer the costs of new server investments by letting you get the most out of your current virtual infrastructure.

Achieve simplified, centralized lifecycle management with virtual machine management capabilities. Novell technologies give you tight control over your heterogeneous virtual environment through policy-driven automation. Now you can provision, copy, move or retire virtual guests on any major hypervisor from a single point of control. And it's all based on your policies and regulations. As a result, it's much easier to meet service level agreements, control virtualization sprawl and reduce the cost of ongoing server management.

Protect more of your resources for less with simplified business continuity from Novell. Our PlateSpin Workload Management solutions offer innovative ways to safeguard your data center through:

• Consolidated recovery
• Flexible image restore

The consolidated recovery capability leverages virtual technology to cost-effectively recover and restore servers in the event of downtime. Because our technologies consolidate operating systems, applications, and data by backing up and restoring whole workloads, you can restore essential operations in minutes. If the worst happens, you can keep users productive by quickly directing them to replicated workloads in the virtual environment or restoring workloads to the available hardware.

Capture whole server workloads—data, applications and operating systems—in any of several available image formats with our flexible image restore capability. In an emergency, you can migrate images over the network from a local or remote image library to any available physical server or virtual host, and restore business operations in just a few hours. You don't even need to rebuild the original server; PlateSpin Workload Management solutions have the flexibility to deploy replicated workloads onto entirely different servers—even from different vendors. Flexible image restore also supports incremental replication with multiple restore points, allowing you to specify a particular point in time for your restore operation, not just the most recent one.

Regular testing is a critical component of any disaster recovery plan. Our workload protection capabilities allow you to easily test the integrity of protected workloads, so you can quickly validate your recovery plan without disrupting your production environment.

Now, with PlateSpin workload management, you can protect all your business-critical servers.

Business-critical server consolidation capabilities provide a robust migration process. Novell delivers the fastest way to get from initial planning concepts to a functional virtual infrastructure, while maximizing uptime and minimizing the risk of migration failure.

1. Develop plans and scenarios based on workload data collected from your enterprise
2. Quickly migrate your workload to a virtual host
3. Test your workload on the virtual host to confirm it operates as expected
4. Happy with the virtual machine? Synchronize only the changes to the workload that happened during testing (no need to migrate the whole workload again), and go live

In addition, our automated solution migrates and reconfigures multiple workloads in parallel, getting you to end-of-job faster. Get back to your real job and let the migrations run unattended; we'll even let you know when they're done.

Confidently virtualize more of the servers in your data center and realize even greater cost savings and efficiency with data center consolidation.

Choosing a High-performance Hypervisor

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server delivers the leading implementation of Xen, the proven open source virtualization hypervisor. You can increase resource utilization, provision business services faster, and increase business continuity by using this capability integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SUSE Linux Enterprise allows you to run fully virtualized Windows Server 2008, 2003, XP and 2000, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 workloads on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with near-native performance.