Why Virtualization makes sense at every stage of IT life cycle

I have been thinking of writing about it for quite some time now & finally here I am -

Any virtualization choice requires a number of options—no matter where you are in your IT life cycle. Perhaps you are virtualizing your first workloads to trim your organization’s IT budget. Maybe you’re trying to standardize or automate your environment to increase reliability and respond faster to business needs. Or you could be building private cloud solutions to ensure flexibility when and where you need it.

More than ever, there is a huge focus in the industry to make their Infrastructure/IT agile & cost effective.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V offers you a flexible virtualization platform that can help you meet any current IT needs and any goals you may have for expanding your IT environment. It supplies an end-to-end solution that can support nearly any scenario without the need for complex customization.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V provides key capabilities that can help meet the needs of your organization at whichever level you are in the virtualization life cycle—Basic, Standardized, Orchestrated, and Automated.

Lets understand each stage of the IT Life Cycle in bit detail, also the relevance & benefits of adopting Virtualization at that stage -

Basic :

Your IT organization is mostly physical servers, and you want to virtualize your workloads—maybe to consolidate your physical servers or to increase the number of servers you can support. It’s time to look at taking the first step into a basic virtualization environment.

With management enhancements and new features to support density, performance, security, and availability, Hyper-V can provides a low-cost, entry-level virtualization solution built into the Windows Server stack.

Benefits -

Consolidate your physical servers
Increase the number of servers you can support
Decrease management of physical servers

Standardize :

You have a number of virtual machines (VMs) running in your organization today. You find that maintaining and managing your growing VM environment manually is taking time and resources away from strategic projects. It’s time to look at standardizing your environment.

Hyper-V and its strong integration with the Virtual Machine Manager component of System Center 2012 can help you do that with “single pane of glass” management for all your virtualized servers. Consistent management across all VMs in your environment can help you have the flexibility to better use your physical and personal resources.

Benefits -

Simplify management of your virtual environment
Free up time and resources for strategic projects
Rapidly provision and optimize virtual machines

Orchestrated ( Also known as Rationalized ) :

While your environment may have a standard management platform, you are still responding manually and reactively to errors and disruptions—even changes that may affect usage, security, and reliability. It’s time to look at orchestrating your environment.

Monitoring your Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V environment with the Operations Manager component of System Center 2012 can help you instantly respond to application errors, physical server errors, resource changes, and even security threats. Automating your Hyper-V environment can help you use the core Hyper-V features in the best possible configuration for your infrastructure – allowing your IT to react to ever changing needs more readily.

Benefits -

Proactively monitor your environment
Respond more readily to changes that may affect usage, security and reliability
Provides end-to-end service management

Automated ( Also known as Dynamic ) :

With the step from Orchestrated to fully Automated, your organization can immediately respond to both application and user needs without heavy lifting. An orchestrated environment provides the ability for the system to respond to the needs of applications and workloads; an automated one offers your IT users and workloads the ability to create entire systems automatically.

With IT allowed to fully provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and through self-servicing and system automation, users and workloads can request runtime, storage, and infrastructure to support them – without the need for IT to manually allocate or build it. Hyper-V is the key platform to support this, providing the flexibility to run the business and integrating seamlessly into your fully optimized private cloud solution.

Benefits -