It’s easy to see why so many IT organizations are so eager to “go virtual.”

By decoupling individual business applications from dedicated hardware, virtualization lets you pool and share resources to meet business demand. So you can add and modify business applications and services more quickly. You can cut costs with a smaller, simpler infrastructure. You can elevate service levels because your people can access needed resources more readily.

Faster. Cheaper. Better. That’s a lot to like. But planning for virtualization can be complex. Virtualization startup and implementation projects can be disruptive to ongoing operations. And virtualization operations and management can pose unfamiliar issues for your technical staff. HP’s virtualization-savvy service professionals are well equipped to help you respond to key challenges across five areas of concern for any virtualization initiative.

Making the most efficient use of your infrastructure starts with accurately measuring your virtualization requirements and opportunities.

HP assessment services help you determine how best to modify your environment and create a sound cost justification and business rationale for virtualization or consolidation. We collect and analyze system and application usage data from servers, storage and desktops. Then we compare the results with historical data and best practices. And we provide recommendations for your initiative.

Proper system configuration and software provisioning are essential for optimizing cost/performance and efficiently supporting projected operating system and application workloads.

HP can apply advanced capacity-measurement tools to evaluate your prospective hardware and software solutions and help establish design criteria for the quantitative and qualitative service levels your business demands. In addition, we can test alternative scenarios to gauge the effects of changing workloads on your critical applications. This helps you identify the best way to improve server utilization and reduce data center space, power and cooling requirements.

Implementing virtualization technology can be a complex, time-consuming challenge that draws your staff away from other critical tasks. HP installation and startup services for virtualization software and related applications are designed to take the pressure off your people and cut your time-to-results.

From pre-installation planning to post-installation testing and staff orientation, our virtualization specialists can provide the just-in-time assistance you need to get your virtualization solution up-and-running fast.

Leveraging virtualized technology for service delivery excellence requires a focus on people and processes, as well as technology.

That’s why HP’s mission-critical services not only deliver custom proactive and reactive support including 24x7 monitoring and access to business-recovery specialists, rapid restoration and repair capabilities and unique service-level guarantees. They also offer continuous service improvement planning that identifies gaps between your current management processes and accepted best practices, and provides recommendations for closing them.

Similarly, HP service management services help you upgrade staff skill levels, accommodate process changes, acquire the right ITIL/ITSM and project-management skills and target your service improvement initiatives.

An educated workforce is key to accelerating and maximizing the return on your virtualization investment. Knowledge transfer from HP gives you a convenient, cost-effective way to enhance your staff’s skills, confidence and productivity. Our education and training curriculum is designed to build both core and advanced virtualization skillsets.

Collaborate with HP to find greater value in virtualizing.

HP Services can help you make the most of today’s leading virtualization products — including VMware, HP Virtual Server Environment, Microsoft Virtual Server and Xen.

We’ve gained an in-depth understanding of today’s top virtualization solutions based on worldwide experience in deploying them in diverse multivendor environments. We are certified in the enabling technologies and best practices that drive high-performance virtualization. And we deliver a broad portfolio of flexible service solutions spanning the virtualization lifecycle.