Blade Watch

Techtarget.com

Despite the many benefits of server virtualization, the technology still poses challenges for corporate data centers. TechTarget’s recent “Virtualization Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey” asked users to identify their server virtualization challenges, and the list was substantial. Backing up virtual machine data and managing storage are two of the biggest challenges for both VMware and Microsoft shops, according to the results.

A great article from Techtarget, (it’s one of the sites I check out regularly), the challenge is managing  the integration of virtualization as a platform within your existing technical and non technical proceses and procedures. The traditional system administration activities can often be perceived as not dynamic enough in the virtual world, backups, rollbacks and rebuilds should all take seconds or minutes, but in practice the internal barriers to delivery (real or perceived) can so easily detract from this, even more so as you scale it up.

We need to be working on virtualization projects in parallel streams, with a focus on not only deploying ESX/Hyper-V or Xen solutions, but combining it with the existing business processes and solutions that need to be included:

• High availability
• Systems administrations to different business units including the different levels of access needed
• Backups – what level of backups and what backup infrastructure is in place – how we do backups to tape/disk or local to the ESX server
• Deployment and builds – how long does it take to build a virtual machine, it may take minutes for the ghosted image to be created but hours to re-configure.
• Storage both in terms of the local machine and the host servers – how much storage mandates that it is not a virtual machine? How do we manage the storage requirements going forward.
• Capacity – we’ve got our current host servers, when and how do we acquire more to provide additional virtual machine capacity and is this a project or a shared business cost? Does IT start pre-provisioning capacity?
• Key though is recovery – how long does it take for a bare metal restore of a hypervisor or virtual machine – if it takes days is the backups solution we have good enough?

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