The flexibility benefits of virtualization are obvious. But implementation can be challenging. Creating a virtual infrastructure requires that physical machines be running, pre-installed with virtualization software, and connected to LAN and SAN in very specific (and sometimes architecturally challenging) ways.

What if you didn't need to pre-configure your environment or change your architecture? What if you could automatically turn on physical machines and run virtual instances on them, regardless of their LAN and SAN connectivity needs? What if you could give your unvirtualizable high-utilization and SPARC production servers the same flexibility as your virtual machines, and simultaneously deploy hypervisors without lengthy, machine-by-machine installation and configuration challenges? What if you could dynamically go from dead bare metal to rolled-out full ESX or Xen servers (with all their virtual machines) -- and then back to bare metal Windows, Linux or Solaris -- in minutes?.

There is a solution: Scalent acts as the "pre-boot" environment for hypervisors, taking physical machines from a "dead bare metal" powered off state to installed, operating, connected VMware ESX or Xen, dramatically extending their functionality to work better in your existing, unmodified data center architecture. Of course, moving existing bare-metal software stacks in and out of virtual machines also becomes a straightforward, 5-minute exercise.

See animated demo | See example topology | See VMware's Data Sheet on Scalent

Companies who have used Scalent software to extend and improve their hypervisor deployments have seen up to 56% improvement in total cost of ownership (TCO) due to:

	Elimination of Hypervisor single-tier LAN and Storage Constraints: Scalent gives you the flexibility to VMotion virtual machines between ESX Servers on different LAN switches, and simply connect your ESX to different SAN LUNs, instead of re-architecting your data center for virtualization. No more need to create a single-tier flat network and configure your storage to allow all such machines access to all of the same storage segments, with associated complexity and security concerns.
	Reduced Hypervisor Deployment Time and Complexity: Scalent's centralized, automatable rapid-repurposing approach dramatically reduces hypervisor deployment time and complexity. Scalent can instantly, remotely, and automatically turn any physical machine or set of machines into any hypervisor or set of hypervisors, networked and connected to storage appropriately, without any physical network changes. So one minute a physical machine may be running Windows and an Exchange server, or Linux and Apache - and two minutes later, it may be a VMware ESX server sharing Virtual Machines with another ESX farm .
	Instant P2V / V2P Migration, Improved Performance and Reduced Risk: Of course, with the ability to instantly repurpose any physical machine into any bare-metal operating system stack or hypervisor, the data center becomes more flexible. High workloads can be run on bare metal, then moved into hypervisor-run virtual machines when load decreases. Hypervisors that fail can failover to new hypervisors without pre-planning or pre-installation. The entire environment becomes safer, more robust, and real-time .
Download our solution brief to learn more.