Blade Watch

http://www.infostor.com/display_article/309836/23/ARTCL/Display/none/1/Guidelines-for-virtualization-preparedness/

October 22, 2007—Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in the IT world these days, due to compelling stories about return on investment (ROI), rapid provisioning capabilities, and application deployment flexibility. Although most of the focus is on server virtualization and its consolidation benefits, virtualization at the network, file, and/or storage layers may also provide a variety of potential benefits. Virtualization has the potential to drastically reduce IT acquisition costs as well as ongoing maintenance costs, helps facilitate disaster-recovery (DR) strategies, and can support critical (but typically painful) data-migration activities as well.

However, several recent surveys have indicated end users’ dissatisfaction around these value propositions: Customers that implement virtualization often cannot quantify or meet the ROI numbers they expected, and in many ways are finding management of the virtualized environment more complex than originally envisioned.

Check out this article about virtualization, the need to be prepared is an important message. But isn’t the danger that companies/users see virtualization as the answer to their problems with data center space, with server sprawl?  Certainly consolidation of the IT infrastructure, the server, the disk, the network can bring real benefits from the energy efficiency standpoint and deployed in the right way can make provisioning a lot quicker and easier. However, we need to also consider what is it that our core business is? What do we want the IT to provide and how do we get there? Is this not where convergence of the infrastructure and application virtualization (grid) comes in? That we can virtualize the server instance, we can migrate those applications which can’t co-exist on the same Windows or Linux server and put them on virtual instances, but it still wont resolve the application dependency on the layered components, the way it makes its calls to the system, how it interacts with the system. An application which has a memory leak on a physical server is still going to have a memory leak on a virtual server, the difference is the restart time should be less in a virtual instance.

Virtualization brings two main things to ahead, it removes the infrastructure element, and it calls to question all those barriers to success with your deployment process. Let’s go over the infrastructure element, that before the limitation was on the infrastructure, that the business just couldn’t provision systems quickly enough, or upgrade their systems, reallocate workload and capacity to the systems that needed it – well we’ve fixed that, we can take the virtual processor and memory and allocate it to those systems that need it, we can take that instance and move it to a faster ESX server or one that’s doing less. The barriers to success, the provisioning issues, the fact that suddenly deploying a server might take weeks to sign off, order, purchase and install has been removed, you want an instance (capacity issues aside) we cut a new instance and life goes on. With these key components resolved what’s the next challenge? How does the billing react? Don’t forget in your corporate environment it’s all about accountancy, charge back, accounting for where the money was spent and by what, how do we then charge for a virtual machine that existed for three weeks? Do they buy the licenses or do I? What about the virtual machine that’s given an extra 2GB RAM overnight to enable the batch to complete more quickly? It’s the moving from an IT department, a cost center with my fixed way of charging, my fixed processes which everyone understands (and might complain about), to a service provisioning, fluid infrastructure, to a dynamic on demand, “you used 25% cpu over the day at £1 per cpu hour, so that’s £8 per day on cpu cost.

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