Given the myriad technological and environmental challenges enterprises now face,
a well-thought-out virtualization strategy is a necessity.
Here's what you need to know
Virtualization has played a part in the enterprise for decades, but only recently has it
taken on new urgency as organizations wrestle with information technology (IT)
infrastructure sprawl, skyrocketing energy bills, cooling challenges, and data center
space constraints. Initially a mainframe phenomenon, virtualization has emerged as
the preferred strategy of organizations everywhere, leading Yankee Group, a Boston-
based technology research and consulting firm, to declare virtualization the future of
IT infrastructure.
Today many organizations are still feeling their way toward virtualization and learning
many lessons along the way. As an IT strategy, virtualization is more than simply a
product to buy. "There are a number of different approaches to virtualization. Before
you get started, you need to think about the problem you are trying to solve," says
Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata Inc., a research firm based in Nashua,
N.H. In addition, organizations embarking on virtualization need to think about
managing the virtualized environment, high availability and disaster recovery,
hardware sizing, network fabric planning, and more.
"There are a number of different approaches to virtualization. Before you get started,
you need to think about the problem you are trying to solve." — Gordon Haff, Illuminata Inc.
The problems most organizations are currently trying to solve with virtualization
include the high cost and constrained availability of energy, the need to reduce data
center heat to lower air conditioning costs, and overcrowding in the data center. The
solution generally comes down to server, storage, and network infrastructure
consolidation.
"We had a lot of processes on traditional 1u and 2u servers, and we were running
into a heat issue in the data center," says Rick Chin, senior vice president for
information technology at Pinnacle Financial Corp., an Orlando, Fla., independently
owned direct mortgage lender.
Chin turned to virtualization, initially running about a dozen servers as virtual
machines under VMware on a Dell blade server connected to a Cisco Catalyst 6513
Switch. "We were able to bring down the temperature about 15 degrees, which
reduced the load on our AC," he reports.
According to Chin, Pinnacle did several things to drop temperature in the data center,
including switching to the blade server and turning off many of the 2U servers. This
dropped the temperature 7 to 8 degrees, and other things dropped the temperature
the other 7 to 8 degrees.
Lessons Learned
Virtualization is a key to infrastructure consolidation. "The industry is coming full circle
as it recentralizes the infrastructure. With the value of virtualization compounded by
the number of resources being virtualized, it pays to recentralize and virtualize all you
can," says Doug Gourlay, Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management for
Cisco Systems.
Another problem organizations are solving with virtualization is infrastructure
availability. "With server virtualization, for example, you can use mobility instead of
taking down servers," Haff says. By mobility, Haff means the ease of moving virtual
servers between physical servers in a cluster. When a physical server needs
maintenance, the virtual servers are easily moved to another physical server without
interrupting service to the users. Through the use of a storage area network (SAN),
the administrators do not even have to redirect the storage. Advanced virtualization
software will even automatically move virtual servers to another server in the cluster
in the event of a failure.
"The faster you can move a virtual machine, the easier it is to solve business
continuity problems," Gourlay says. Virtual machines are very easy to move over a
network; everything is encapsulated in a single file. And when the data is on the SAN,
"you can move the server without even moving the data store," he adds.
Simple as virtualization sounds, there are some pitfalls to avoid. First, you need to
plan capacity and size the hardware correctly. "You want to start with a baseline
assessment," Gourlay says. This assessment looks at the existing infrastructure and
the utilization of each component individually. Understanding utilization is the key to
successful virtualization.
"You want to take a holistic view of the infrastructure," he continues. Too often
organizations just look at server utilization. In a holistic approach, you look at storage
and network as well as servers. "You need all three to process the workload," Gourlay
notes.
Although you can take a lightly utilized server, add virtualization software, and start
creating virtual servers, most experts suggest starting with new hardware.
Virtualization carves up and manages the physical resources so that they can be
shared by multiple virtual machines. Starting with more processing power, memory,
and bandwidth provides a distinct advantage.
"The next time you have a planned infrastructure build out is the time to deliver an
end-to-end virtualization approach," Gourlay says. The new servers, for example, will
likely have faster processors and more memory. Similarly, new switches will deliver
greater bandwidth and capacity, which will come in handy as more virtual servers vie
for server and bandwidth resources.
Deploy virtualization on existing servers when you only want to test virtualization and
determine the operational requirements. In that case, add virtualization software to
the server and experiment with virtualization. You will gain virtualization skill and
experience at very low risk and be ready to move to enterprise-class virtualization
with confidence.
Finally, you will need to consider management. "In some ways management will be
harder; in other cases it will be easier," Haff says.
Management becomes harder, because your physical servers will have to be managed
for maximum availability and reliability. You are putting many virtual applications on
one physical server-all your eggs, in effect, are in one basket-so you cannot allow it to
fail. That means redundant everything, failover clusters, predictive analysis to avert
failures, and more.
What is not more difficult is managing those many virtual servers. That gets easier,
because server virtualization products typically include effective administrative
consoles. Tools for managing the rest of the virtualized data center are in a nascent
stage, though.
"The tools will be there when the customer needs them," Gourlay says. Cisco, for
example, offers the Cisco VFrame Data Center, and orchestration platform that
enables an organization to manage its compute, networking, and storage resources
as a set of virtualized services. More tools will be coming.
And do not forget the people. Along with the right tools, another lesson learned is to
have a technician on your team dedicated to learning and managing virtualization.
Pinnacle's Chin says having a particularly good technician on his team who embraced
the challenge was another key plus. "It's not difficult to set up virtualization, but it's
always helpful to have an enthusiastic technician," he says. "And it doesn't require
much maintenance once you have the virtual machines running."
Virtualization Lessons Learned
For more information on Enterprise Virtualization, contact the experts at integraONE,
a Premier certified Cisco Systems partner, at 484-223-3480 or e-mail sales@integra1.net.
Article written by Alan Radding for Cisco Systems. Reprinted with permission.