Why Your Business Should Choose VMware

Posted on by Melanie Purkis | Updated:
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VMware is one of the world's largest virtualization and cloud computing solutions. It is frequently discussed by companies considering 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% of organizations with more than 50 employees use virtual machines, and 75% of those use VMware.

With so many choosing the same platform for their virtualization, the question becomes, why VMware? How can your business benefit from using VMware today? You’ll find the answer in the article below, but first, we need to discuss what VMware is.

What Is VMWare?

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. Additionally, VMware can run directly on server hardware through its bare metal ESXi hypervisor, which doesn’t require an underlying operating system.

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 configuration and distribute their resources across VMware-powered virtual machines.

Furthermore, companies can easily outsource the management of their hosting infrastructure. Your team can deploy software, hardware, and daily cloud operations to official VMware partners to focus on creating their own software solutions in a flexible development environment. But we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the benefits of VMware. Let’s explore more below. 

Why Do Companies Use VMware?

Companies rely on VMware to help them take advantage of the capabilities of modern cloud computing. By shifting their infrastructure to a virtual environment, businesses can save time and money – both from the migration itself and the efficiencies it creates in organizational workflows.  

What Are the Benefits of VMware for Business?

Here are a few of the key benefits of the software to help you understand why VMware is so important in helping businesses get ahead:

  • Security based on a zero-trust framework – VMware implements 5 pillars in their zero-trust framework to ensure your organization is considering security from all angles. This approach eliminates the existence of a network edge – an area hackers seem to target frequently.  
  • Simpler data management – Organizations can easily migrate, access, edit, and transfer files, once they exist on VMware’s cloud virtualization platform. Teams can get things done anywhere and at any time. 
  • More efficient and agile systems – Migrating to the cloud eliminates the need for on-site servers and storage. This frees up resources to process other mission-critical applications and expand critical file repositories. 
  • Improved backup and disaster recovery (BDR) – By virtualizing your company’s data, you can avoid sudden service outages and natural disasters. Even if your organization is headquartered in an area facing a weather event, you can rest at ease knowing your data is safe and secure in the cloud.
  • Optimized provisioning – VMware uses a technology called thin provisioning. This technology allows VMs to allocate resources on demand where needed most – load balancing across partitions and preventing your resources from being bogged down.

Why Do Businesses Need Virtualization?

Until the advent of virtualization, businesses had to rely on physical servers. In fact, data centers can contain hundreds of these large resource-intensive machines. 

Now companies can rival the computing power of large corporations with much fewer resources. Since several virtual machines can exist within one physical server, organizations can operate with a much larger pool of resources at a lower cost. You’ll also save money by reducing the number of hires you need to manage setup and maintenance.

Leveraging VMware’s cloud technology also allows businesses several other benefits. Teams will experience improved business continuity, and VMware also provides a dedicated testing environment for those teams iterating software applications.

5 Reasons to Choose VMWare

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

1. Security

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. vSphere’s GUI enables 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 vCenter also makes it easy to design a secure backup solution for all your cloud infrastructure at once. This will improve file management and drastically reduce the risk of losing files. At Liquid Web, VMware backups are powered by Acronis Cyber Backup – pairing the protection of VMware backups with the added encryption of Acronis. 

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

2. High Availability

vmware is highly available

When you virtualize your infrastructure, you can run each of your workloads in the most suitable environment. 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 and 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. You’ll be able to deploy your cloud-native software as often as needed and support a large active user base for your product. Liquid Web helps you achieve this through the top speed and availability of your VMware Private Cloud via ultra-fast NetApp SAN storage and 10 GB networking. 

3. Scalability

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 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 to keep your critical processes 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.

4. Data Compliance

Another benefit of VMware Private Cloud is 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.

5. Ease of Use

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 readily scaled up using available resources from other virtual machines. 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. This is why Vmware virtualization is increasingly becoming a reliable and cost-efficient choice as companies of all sizes look to modernize their infrastructure.

6. Reduce Costs

The reduction in cost alone might be enough of a reason why your business needs VMware. Cloud infrastructure is cheaper than dedicated. A physical, on-site data center requires a significant upfront investment. Then, you’ll have to pay for ongoing software and hardware maintenance. And don’t forget about hiring the technicians that will perform said maintenance.

You’ll also reduce costs by running multiple virtual machines within one physical server. In a dedicated or physical server scenario, one machine is one machine. But thanks to virtualization, various machines can be run in one physical host server, allowing you and your team to accomplish more while using fewer resources – financial and otherwise. 

7. Increase Efficiency

Another reason why you might choose Vmware is its efficiency. Leveraging virtualization helps teams from all over the globe connect on projects and deliverables. Virtual machines also free up system resources to run other apps or tools to further increase your team’s efficiency.

8. Affordability

VMware is also more affordable than other hosting alternatives. Since you’re operating your infrastructure in the cloud, purchasing expensive IT hardware and software is unnecessary. You’ll also save money by running multiple virtual machines within one physical server. This replication of server environments allows you to do more with less, putting your cloud computing on par with some of the biggest corporations – an extremely valid reason why your business needs VMware. 

Move to the Cloud With Liquid Web

At this point, we trust you’re not asking yourself, “Why Vmware?” anymore. If you’re ready to make a move, Liquid Web can take care of your entire hosting infrastructure, from hardware through the cloud, so you can 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.

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About the Author

Melanie Purkis

Melanie Purkis is the Director of Liquid Web's Managed Hosting Products & Services. Melanie has more than 25 years of experience with professional leadership, project management, process development, and technical support experience in the IT industry.

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