Why Your Business Needs VMware: Top 5 Reasons

VMware is one of the largest virtualization and cloud computing solutions in the world and is frequently discussed by companies that are thinking about moving at least some of their computing resources to the cloud.

There are lots of advantages provided by using virtual machine capabilities on the cloud through VMware, from better management of traffic spikes to flexible software testing environments.

In fact, businesses are increasingly relying on virtualization — about 75 percent of organizations with more than 50 employees use virtual machines, and 75 percent of those use VMware.

So can your business benefit from using VMware today? The answer is probably yes.

But to explain why in detail, it would be beneficial to answer what VMware is.

VMware is a software company for cloud infrastructure. Started in 1998, VMware was the first to virtualize the x86 architecture and can now run virtualization software on Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as directly on server hardware through its bare-metal ESXi hypervisor, which doesn’t require an underlying operating system at all.

When it comes to everyday solutions, most companies turn to VMware to make switching to the cloud seamless and effective. With VMware, a company can pool together any number of physical servers of any specifications and distribute their resources across VMware-powered virtual machines.

Even better, companies can easily outsource the management of their hosting infrastructure, including software and hardware, as well as their day-to-day cloud operations to official VMware partners to focus on creating their own software solutions in a flexible development environment.

But there are many other benefits of VMware and using a VMware Private Cloud besides that.

Here are the top five reasons why your business should choose VMware:

At Liquid Web, we offer a fully Managed Private Cloud solution that takes care of your entire hosting infrastructure along with a few extra features such as VMware vCenter, so you can easily control your vSphere environments.

VMware vCenter is a powerful server management software that gives you centralized visibility into your whole cloud infrastructure from a single window.

With VMware vCenter, you can easily manage your ESXi hosts and all their virtual machines.

One of the most important advantages of VMware vCenter Server, which can be installed on either Windows or Linux, is the intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) of its vSphere Client that allows you to manage all your ESXi hosts without resorting to complex terminal configurations.

In fact, using VMware vCenter Server is required to access some advanced vSphere features related to high availability, fault tolerance, vMotion, and the Distributed Resource Scheduler.

VMware center also makes it easy to design a secure backup solution for all of your cloud infrastructure at once, reducing the risk of losing files.

At Liquid Web, VMware backups are powered by Acronis Cyber Backup.

Finally, with centralized user (via vCenter Single Sign-On) management and controls, VMware vCenter gives you the ability to safeguard your company from insider threats or remote code execution attacks.

When you virtualize your infrastructure, you gain the opportunity to run each of your workloads in an environment that was optimized for it. Most of those workloads are also likely to switch between running in the background and springing into action, which requires you to create a system with high availability.

The backbone of VMware’s high availability is made up of three properly configured tools: vSphere High Availability, vSphere vMotion, and the Distributed Resource Scheduler. These tools improve your VMware centralized management and let you control ESXi hosts as well as their virtual machines to move live workloads, quickly work around security issues, and conduct routine server maintenance. 

Using VMware enterprise-grade resource allocation tools helps your business keep technical cloud infrastructure management to a minimum while being able to deploy your cloud-native software as often as needed and support a large active user base for your product.

At Liquid Web, we ensure the top speed and availability of your VMware Private Cloud by powering it with ultra-fast NetApp SAN storage and 10 Gb networking. 

Adopting VMware Private Cloud becomes especially valuable when you expect spikes in demand—when you’re preparing to release a new version of your web application, for example. In this case, agile cloud infrastructure can help mitigate any downtime risks and save on costs. 

When you use VMware Private Cloud, you can choose which workloads your virtual machines should work on and automatically rebalance them as needed so that your critical processes keep running. If all your virtual machines are busy, you can also scale up your cloud temporarily to match your needs and scale it back down later. 

With a VMware vCenter Server, all this scalability is easy to manage, as each instance can support up to 1,000 ESXi hosts and 10,000 active virtual machines. In addition, it’s possible to buy extra vCPUs, RAM, and storage as you grow without adding more dedicated hardware.

Another benefit of VMware Private Cloud is in its adaptability to various security and regulatory needs, such as HIPAA Compliance Hosting for healthcare organizations. 

Since VMware can use lots of sandboxed virtual machines, each workload would be completely isolated, even though it runs on the same hardware, providing peace of mind for you and your users.

VMware virtualization solves yet another critical problem — provisioning resources required for tasks at various times. Without virtualization, secure resources for intensive tasks are expensive, which are then wasted when your resources temporarily decrease. 

With virtualization, any environment can be scaled up in the shortest amount of time, using available resources from other virtual machines while they are running idle. So you can scale up your environment to complete tasks when needed and then scale it back down to save on costs when not. 

Also, as stated above, administrators do not need to utilize complex terminal configurations but can depend on VMware vCenter GUI to monitor and control their various workloads.

As companies of all sizes continue to modernize their infrastructure, virtualization is increasingly becoming a reliable and cost-efficient choice.

Ready to make a move? Liquid Web can take care of your entire hosting infrastructure, from hardware through the cloud, so you can just focus on managing your virtual machine and applications. Contact us and one of our technicians would be happy to walk you through the process and answer any additional questions, or check out our VMware Private Cloud plans.