The original pair of VBlock’s were purchased to replace a hodgepodge of small VM clusters of 3 to 4 VM hosts and an outdated SAN, in addition to moving from an old data center to a new data center. Moving the VM’s from the old systems to the new VBlock --which had more shared resources and a newer VMware version-- was a big win. Once in place, we virtualized as many servers as could be converted from freestanding servers to a VM. The only exception was when the licensing of an application was cost prohibitive; we keep these on stand-alone hosts. This was mainly due to application licensing bias, rather than limits on virtualization.

Centralized virtual hosting platform in a cohesive system with a bundled verified combination of known hardware, firmware, virtualization

It's a little bit easier to maintain and easier when an upgrade needs to take place, since the vendor is handling the integration aspects usually for a fee.

Legacy delivery times are usually known for being slow. Buying computing, storage and network components usually take times as much as you multiply providers. vBlock products are fully engineered and delivered operational, and the VCE promise is that a vBlock is delivered less than 45 days after SOW (State of Work), which means that you have a fully working solution into your datacenter quickly. That’s not only a promise, that’s the reality.

The first step is the Logical Configuration Survey (LCS) which is done by customers, helped by architects and engineers from VCE for networking, computing, and storage needs. This phase is done after less than 21 days, and assumes it to be the initial configuration build of your vBlock. The LCS is used by VCE to factory build your vBlock, and by the pro-support team to directly key into the device to finalize the delivery and realize the final test before giving you the keys.

We have seen measurable increases in our system performance. Those increases have been directly measurable in application performance and the delivery of critical business information to our users.

It has improved system performance, batch times for off-hours processing, and reliability with production applications.

It gives us the flexibility to grow the environment when necessary.

• Access to VMs is now faster due to the centralized management console.
• Navigation is easy and self-explanatory.

• The high redundancy of components has minimized frequent service degradation/failure.

In the past the server team would spend weeks downloading and testing interoperability with different versions of firmware on the servers, switches, fabric, and storage to get the most up to date and bug free operations. Now VCE gives us basically a menu of firmware versions and we can upgrade to the latest version and interoperability is guaranteed.

Provides DR capability which we have never had before.

An example would be one that I've seen where we were having to increase the capacity of its storage array size. We thought that there had to be downtime scheduled, but we found out that you can increase the storage capacity without having to disrupt, shut down, or schedule down time of the Vblock. It was rather seamless to perform.

It gives us a private, internal cloud and a self-provisioning portal for personnel to spin up their own VMs.

We used to have different departments, each with their own IT section. Everybody was making their own IT investments, and every department had their own little bits of applications here and applications there. Now, it's all coordinated, all synchronized. That reduces the risk of equipment and costs as well. We no longer have people running different applications, different tools, in a multi-vendor environment. Now, we have one synchronized solution.

Troublesome relationships with VCE at the beginning of our use came undone quickly after we went live, making installs/adds/changes less than cohesive. 

I collaborated in a Vblock growth sizing and analysis. The scalability of the solution is interesting.