Efficient Infrastructure Operation in a Multihypervisor World

Dell and Microsoft announced in early 2011 that they are jointly developing reference architectures and turnkey products to help customers quickly launch and gain value from virtualized infrastructure investments.

The three-year strategic partnership aims to develop a series of integrated virtualization deployment and management solutions targeted at IT buyers tasked with planning, implementing and optimizing multihypervisor environments. Dell and Microsoft further hope to enable customers to implement and effectively operate whatever mix of physical and virtual infrastructure and cloud resources they need by creating a joint end-to-end management stack based on Dell™ Virtual Integrated System (VIS) and Microsoft® System Center.

This collaboration between Dell and Microsoft has already produced the following products and services:

• Dell Business-Ready Configuration for Windows Server® Hyper-V — A ready-to-assemble solution that is built to conform to Dell’s reference architecture. It is available in several standard blade server and Hyper-V configurations including 60, 120 and 180 virtual servers.
• vStart for Microsoft® Hyper-V™ — vStart from Dell is a virtual infrastructure solution that provides customers with a presized, fully configured virtual server environment that includes ready-to-go enclosures, blades, virtualization software and management tools.
• New offerings from Dell Services to assist IT organizations in the design, implementation and management of multihypervisor environments.

Planned integrations between Microsoft System Center management suite and Dell VIS architecture include:

• Advance Infrastructure Manager (AIM) automation
• VIS Self-Service Creator
• VIS Director

These upcoming solutions are aimed to further automate IT processes and optimize the performance of Hyper-V and associated virtualized workloads on Dell hardware, and to optimize the ability of System Center to manage the Dell infrastructure.