3.5 Virtualization Considerations

A major consideration for the design of the customer’s infrastructure is whether or not the customer is willing to virtualize some of the ZENworks Configuration Management infrastructure components. With version 10.2, the components are supported on both VMware and Xen. This could be an excellent low-cost alternative to hosting more ZENworks Configuration Management servers on fewer physical servers.

For example, if the customer is required to deploy three physical servers in the data center, it might be possible to increase this number to two or three hosted virtual servers on two physical servers. This would create additional fault tolerance and redundancy, as well as better performance across the board.

If the customer is considering running their ZENworks Configuration Management infrastructure on either SUSE Enterprise Server (SLES) or Windows Server, technologies such as the PlateSpin product set could also assist, including fault-tolerance capabilities provided by PlateSpin Forge, assessment capabilities provided by PowerRecon, and workload management capabilities provided by PowerConvert.