Key issues with vmware

http://www.bladewatch.com/2007/01/11/the-cost-of-a-virtual-infrastructure/

Though check out the vmware world documents, they are very good. http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld/

I met my friend Chris who’s doing vmware deployments for an update, having spoken to him earlier last week and posted his views this week. We came on to what problems he was having and the ones I’d had in the past, thought we’d go over them:

Poor perception
Production ready
Inadequate planning
Ineffective consolidation
Delivery
High costs
Adoption

Poor perception

Relationship and perception is key, you only need one development team broadcasting how bad it is, for the rest of the development community to switch off. Have one team that handles ESX, so that we know clearly who to speak to with clear communication lines, explain the technologies, demonstrate it working, show the possibilities, and where it is appropriate.

Not production ready

Ensure that ESX is owned, that someone is actively looking at the ESX hosts, that monitoring is in place, so that if your ESX server goes down, we’re aware, investigating and striving to return service. Use tools like vmotion or virtual center so that as an ESX server gets busy we can be more proactive, not waiting for a developer/user to phone up and say “It’s slow”.

Inadequate strategic planning

Think long term, you’re consolidating say 220 servers to vmware, what’s the capacity plan?  How is it going to be scaled up?  Can you start looking at vmware for production servers?  Isn’t the strategy first of all to get everything that’s infrastructure (not business facing directly) and not physically required to be virtual?  To be able say to the business “Well we’re 60% virtual why aren’t you?”

Consolidation handled badly

Proactively resolve issues which might cause delays or problems with the consolidation, life’s too short, and since perception remains key it’s important. Use the migration time to improve the servers you consolidate, clear down those files, check the configurations, check the patch revisions, the layered components, and most of all above else ensure your network connection is as close to ‘production’ i.e, development as possible.  There’s no point migrating 10 servers from 100/full to 10/half if the users are going to complain about network speeds.

I’ll give you an example, when migrating your windows 2000 DL360’s, some of them may have 256mb ram, and a 4gb drive for C.  Double the ram memory, increase the C drive to a reasonable size so you aren’t visiting them later causing an outage which will be associated with IT, with vmware.

Delivery

Effective delivery equates to effective perception, thereby more budget, more consolidation, less power.  Ensure all the processes are in place, the agreements about costs or responsibilities and service level agreements, the virtual estate may only be development for the time being, but your development community influence production, when it comes to project specifications/requirements, “physical boxes only for this application”, and you need their support to migrate production.

I’ll give you an example.  I want an extra 256MB ram for my virtual session, in reality this is a five minute change, shut the session down, allocate the memory and power it back up – don’t let this take days/weeks on-end due to approval, process or just support not answering the help desk calls. Deal with the expected issues, I want a sever, is it support or investment, it’s a business need, that’s all.

Ensure your build is configured for vmware, if your existing physical server build takes one business day to do, ensure when it’s virtualized it doesn’t, there will be little benefit to a virtual server if the build time is the same, rapid deployment whether you use altiris or a vmware tool, as long as it works.

High costs

Keep your costs in control and recognize the ‘cost of doing business’, migrating a DL360G3 and the application team are debating the £450 depreciation cost, don’t let £450 de-rail a business line from signing up to vmware particularly if they’re going to do so grudgingly, once I’m negative I’ll stay negative unless given a reason to do so.

Think about the way you’re going to charge it, in essence you’re providing a service; make sure that the first person wanting a virtual machine isn’t forced to face buying an ESX server. Consolidating your server estate should be moving to the grid way of doing business – that is on-demand.

Adoption

One of the challenges is getting teams to migrate to vmware, people are often cautious of change.  Involve the application teams from the beginning; explain the cost of power, the problems with datacenter space, and the fluidity of the infrastructure.  You need a server for testing, log a call, it’s delivered same day.  But at the same time, follow it through, make your promises happen.

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