Virtual Perfection with ShoreTel and VMware
Server virtualization promises significant benefits to the many IT organizations that are struggling to keep pace with business demands – with tight budgets. With virtualization, organizations can consolidate and modernize their server infrastructure, which improves IT resource utilization, lowers cost and allows IT to adapt more flexibly to changing business needs.
The adoption of virtualization is expected to be rapid: Fifty percent of the x86 architecture workloads, representing 58 million deployed machines, will be running in virtual machines by 2012, predicts Gartner.
Organizations can extend the many benefits of virtualization to unified communications with the latest ShoreTel software release that can run on VMware's vSphere virtualization platform. By running on vSphere, all applications, including voicemail, automated attendant, call accounting and reporting, and workgroup capabilities, run in a virtualized environment.
This extends all the benefits of virtualization from the data center to the branch office, as both the ShoreTel headquarters and remote servers run on VMware.
Benefits of Virtualizing UC
"Running ShoreTel on a virtual server enables organizations to simplify their data center infrastructure," explained Dieter Rencken, senior product manager at ShoreTel. "With fewer, more powerful servers, IT has fewer devices to purchase, maintain and manage, which contributes to a lower total cost of ownership."
Companies using VMware solutions have reduced capital costs by as much as 60 percent, cut time spent on routine administration by up to one third, and reduced energy costs by up to 80 percent, according to VMware.
Green benefits are also encouraging the migration to a virtualized environment as consolidating servers results in a smaller physical footprint in the data center, which translates into lower power and cooling requirements, and energy savings.
ShoreTel's high availability also is enhanced with virtualization. By running ShoreTel in a virtual environment, organizations achieve the delicate balance between server consolidation and reliability. ShoreTel UC benefits from the availability and failover capabilities inherent in VMware, which makes it easier for organizations to meet their business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.
Ease of management continues to be a key advantage of the ShoreTel UC system in a virtualized environment. IT staff can manage the system from anywhere on the network, using the same tools and processes as a dedicated ShoreTel UC system.
When some competitive solutions run in a virtual environment, different functions of the UC system operate in different virtual machines. This in turn means that they must be installed and managed individually which continues to reflect the complexity of those solutions. Not so with ShoreTel. Administrators continue to easily manage the system using ShoreTel Director.
"We've seen huge customer demand for virtualization, but fear of virtualization's performance penalty used to be the single hurdle that kept many IT managers from running real-time applications like voice in a virtual environment," Mr. Rencken added. "The latest generation of virtual technology means that there's virtually no performance penalty. Just follow our configuration recommendations and you'll be able to deliver the quality of service your users expect."
ShoreTel's VMware Ready™ status indicates that ShoreTel has passed a detailed evaluation and testing process managed by VMware. Passing the VMware-specified testing helps ensure that ShoreTel makes the best use of VMware technology and is ready for deployment in customer environments.
