Verizon Business Launches Virtualization Consulting Services

The rapid growth of virtualization has piqued the interest of many companies looking to make money on the latest trends in business IT, and Verizon Business is now one of them: Verizon announced this morning that it has unveiled a new Virtualization Consulting and Management Services group to offer a "suite of consulting and management services that covers every aspect of virtualization."

As many Windows IT Pro readers know, virtualization can help trim IT budgets and provide additional operational flexibility when it comes to delivering IT resources on an as-needed basis. That said, managing and deploying a virtual infrastructure may not be something that every IT department has the requisite skill and knowledge to pull off on their own. That's where Verizon Business hopes its new service offerings can be of use.

"Our goal is to cover the entire virtualization lifecycle," Abby Gregory, Manager of Global Services for Verizon Business, told me earlier today in a phone interview. "We can help our clients at any point in the deployment lifecycle, and we're facility and technology agnostic -- we don't push our customers toward any specific technology."

That agnosticism doesn't apply to virtualization vendors, as Gregory explains that Verizon Business is initially focused on offering virtualization services based on VMware products, given VMware's 85% market share among enterprise clients and customer demand. "Our engineers are familiar with virtualization offerings from Citrix and Microsoft, but customer demand is focused on VMware right now."

Verizon Business will offer a variety of virtualization support services, ranging from server consolidation assessment and design to virtualization build-outs and deployments at customer facilities, or in facilities provided by Verizon. These services are available immediately in North America, Europe, and in Asia-Pacific regions. For more information, visit http://www.verizonbusiness.com/us/itsolutions.

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Related Reading:

Virtualization Tips and Tricks
By John Savill

Q. Does Hyper-V support Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption running on the host?

A. You can enable BitLocker on all volumes with Windows Server 2008, if you want. With virtualization, you place your virtual hard disks (VHDs) on the file system, which may contain sensitive information or be running on a server that isn't physically secure, so the question often comes up if BitLocker can be used on volumes that hold VHDs. Using BitLocker on a volume with VHDs is a fully supported configuration and one you are very likely to use in branch or remote offices or any location where you can't physically secure the servers.

Click the following link to read the rest of the answer.