Virtualization types and where to begin

Decipherinfosys

A lot has been said and written about virtualization and a lot of companies are finding benefits adopting it in their IT infrastructure or the data centers that they might be hosting their applications with.  At Decipher, we have been supporting our clients with their virtualization needs specifically with the VMWare and Hyper-V solutions and have also blogged about it before.  Recently, while making a presentation to a potential client, one of the questions that was asked by the Operations Manager was to give a brief overview of virtualization and the different types of virtualization.  We are sharing that with our readers as well here.

Basically, virtualization is dis-associating the tight bond between software and hardware.  In a traditional world, one would use one server for their Oracle instance, one for a Microsoft instance, yet another one to host their Exchange Server and so on for the other applications that they have to support.  At times, you would be able to consolidate them assuming that the OS, providers and the different vendor requirements are common.  What this ends up doing is give you a tons of servers to manage, which consume more power, waste the resources on these boxes because some of these servers would be under-utilized (CPU, Memory wise).  Not only that, if you need to add more capacity you would either try to scale up (more memory or additional processors if possible) or scale out (more servers).  By being able to dis-associate the bond between the software and the hardware one can then use the same hardware to serve up the needs of the different software servers.  So, you could be running Oracle, MS SQL Server, Exchange, Great Plans, Dynamics CRM, etc. all on the same hardware.  By doing this, it is also possible to run different operating systems so I could run MS SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 Server and at the same time run, Oracle on Linux all running on the same hardware.  By doing this, the resources will be better utilized and also allow us to easy add another VM on the same hardware assuming that we have the capacity.  There are additional benefits as well like making use of the vmotion capabilities of VMWare etc..

So, that was a 50,000 ft. overview of virtualization.  So, how does it really work?  What breaks the bond between the software and the hardware?  We are going to talk only about VMWare’s ESX Server 3.5 and MSFT’s Hyper-V since the older offerings from both these vendors had a different architecture.  Both of these are based off hypervisor based architecture.   A hypervisor which is also sometimes called a VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) is essentially a hardware platform virtualization software using which one can run different OS on the same hardware at the same time.  Hypervisor has access to the physical host hardware.  Even though both Microsoft’s solution as well as the VMWare solution are based on the same hypervisor based technology, there are differences in how the implementation is done.  We won’t cover all those differences here but will provide some links.

Check out this post about the different types of virtualization a topic of conversation that I was having with colleagues the other day, it’s an interesting read. There have been many articles about virtualization of the application, the desktop, the server, the network or storage.

The first steps should be regarding understanding your environment, what your core skills are, what the key drivers for a virtualization project would be in terms of cost or delivery.  With this in mind understanding what aspects we can virtualize, what we can consolidate or centralize. One thing to consider is whether you need virtualization, or consolidation, whether it might be that what we need in the small business is to buy in specific services rather than have our own managed ones (email rather than Exchange for example).

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