An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

Team Register

In association with

Introduction
In a busy IT department, it can be all too easy to lose sight of how tactical additions to the IT environment build up over the years. The incumbent workhorse servers plough on day after day in the dark corner of the data center, while new exciting projects take center stage and get shiny new servers to run on. Then, one day, you turn round and find youve got several hundred applications to support across a range of departments, and, of course, a myriad of under utilized servers. Server sprawl is all too common. Major applications and web-facing services can often require an entire server landscape of their own. Even smaller, more-focused applications require certain amount of horse-power. And this should come as no surprise to anyone; for years now, vendors and industry experts have recommended dedicated servers for dedicated services.
If you add up everything in the boxes, racks, and blade chassis, how many physical x86 servers would you say exist in your infrastructure?
% 0 Over 1,000 employees 50-1,000 employees Under 50 employees Over 1,000 servers 10 to 50 servers 50 to 1,000 servers Under 10 servers 20 40 60 80 100

Figure 1 It is typical of larger organisations to have many hundreds of servers in place, sometimes even thousands, and it is not uncommon for smaller organizations at the other end of the scale to be running tens of servers.

Server sprawl has been a part of the IT landscape for years and inevitably works to the detriment of the organization by making routine tasks, such as patch management, application provisioning, and general monitoring and management, increasingly bloated overheads. But thats all gradually changing thanks to server virtualization.

Where is server virtualization taking us?

Server virtualization comes in a variety of shapes and forms, depending on the size of your organization, the scale of the operations you run, and your operational suitability to virtualization. The majority of workloads that have been virtualized to date are what we might refer to as the easy operational targets. Theyre either self-contained workloads, low risk systems, or those that would feel an immediate benefit from a move to virtualization. The vision of virtualization, however, is something far greater. Virtualization done correctly could and should deliver: Improvements to the management of available physical capacity Improved control of (virtual) machines Simplified operational management of the virtual server pool Reduced risk due to the flexibility improvements for business continuity

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

 Dynamically scalable resources to meet demands These benefits are of huge appeal to IT departments the world over, although recognizing them is not necessarily straight forward. As virtualization projects are moving out of the pilot phase into more mainstream use, you can see organizations hitting road blocks to a major roll-out. This can be because of bottlenecks in operations or infrastructure, skill set challenges, or broader manageability concerns. Careful planning can help avoid some of these pitfalls

Operational benefits of virtualization

If people are typically seeing server virtualization ratios of 5:1 admittedly, the more experienced seem to be aiming considerably higher - then that suggests an awful lot of servers are being virtualized. Given that most people are starting with application virtualization leaving databases and security solutions to later projects then we must assume that projects with consolidation as an end goal are reaching maturity. Therefore, its time to look at the operational benefits that can be gained from virtualization and crucially how to gain them.
Focusing on x86 servers in particular, roughly what consolidation ratios do you typically achieve or expect on average?
% 0
2:1 5:1 10:1 20:1 50:1 Higher Unsure / NA

10

20

30

40

50

Figure 2 Consolidation ratios of between 5:1 and 10:1 are typically achieved with x86 server consolidation.

Lets look at the obvious potential benefits first: improved server utilization. If youve got a room full of under-utilized servers then, yes, youre probably very quickly going to start feeling some operational benefits by virtue of consolidation and the fact that you no longer need to manage so many boxes. Equally, if you have power and cooling constraints, consolidation can give you a decent operational boost by enabling you to use these services more efficiently. Presumably, that means youre going to be clearing some floor space and using fewer expensive switches and ports too or potentially using them more efficiently at least. Add all of that together and the theory goes you will gain some hard and fast cost benefits to add to your operational benefits, in the form of power savings. Its more than likely that theory is true too. Just dont expect them overnight. Power savings come in long cycles. Systems resilience and disaster recovery is another one of the big wins from a virtualized architecture. It can take previously impractical DR solutions into a whole new era of smooth operation. Given that the virtual machine has its own virtual disk file, a backup can be run on the host physical machine of said file the VHD or VMDK in Microsoft and VMware parlance respectively.

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

In similar fashion, virtualizing multiple apps onto a highly available virtualized infrastructure can more than help IT operations staff sleep safe at night it can help the entire business operate more efficiently from top to bottom. Imagine knowing the resource level for 100 servers on a single screen - or perhaps being just two or three clicks away from conducting a full image or file level backup of an entire server. The notion of pooling hardware resources and making horsepower available more flexibly on demand, and then paring it back when demand decreases is a real possibility with a virtualized architecture. Essentially, its just taking virtualization to the next level by spinning up or closing down virtual machines and images very quickly. There are challenges with achieving this, thats for sure. But its not beyond the realms of possibility to deliver some of these benefits to the business today. Development flexibility can also be a quick win for an organization that plans its virtualization project carefully. The ability to test software upgrades to production servers by copying and testing in a separate virtual environment before doing the upgrade in the production environment delivers huge advantages and peace of mind. There are of course caveats to virtualization so dont go rushing off thinking its the promised land. Software vendors still have significant steps to take in their licensing models, middleware vendors have arguably not met the virtualized worlds needs yet, and a lot of the Hypervisor vendors have not reached the benchmarks in areas many would have hoped such as guaranteeing back up integrity, reinforcing security, etc. Thats not to mention the more tangible issue of what happens if you have memory leaks on a server with 25 applications running on it do you shut down the entire thing to apply the patches? What happens if applications from different vendors have problems and neither will take responsibility because of the other application on the virtualized server? Of course, if you plan your virtualization projects correctly, you should in theory at be able to avoid those pitfalls.

Planning Virtualization
Like all IT projects, planning is the core component. Its the one thing that should, and hopefully will, take the most time of all the project stages. This is particularly true of virtualization which, with its immediately gratifying goal of consolidation, can lead organizations into troubled waters. The temptation is to run towards that quick win of improved server utilization and ignore the huge benefits that can be gained with good planning and smaller steps. (An often quoted problem when gunning for these short term goals is the subsequent effect on the storage infrastructure for instance where SAN requirements have been massively understated and the server pool ends up in a quagmire of problems.) This is ultimately the whole point of planning. Its all about understanding the end goals and taking the right steps to get there successfully. To put it in the context of virtualization, what youre trying to avoid is heading down the road towards managing your virtual estate in the same unautomated way that you might manage your physical estate and get there only to find youve saved some floor space but created a mess. See Fig 3 for a demonstration of just some of the challenges you can face during a consolidation program and the relative benefits you can gain. So what do you do? You can start by making sure you ask yourself the right questions. Questions such as, Are your infrastructure or support operations ready for virtualization? or Whats the business advantage of virtualization? are red herrings. A more important

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

question is that age-old What IT services are you trying to deliver? coupled with And how can they best be delivered with virtualization as part of the mix? Virtualization has a number of strengths ease of deployment and provisioning, for example, workload flexibility and scalability, increased infrastructure resilience. But you and your IT organization will have to decide which of these qualities are important and in what proportion. The architectural view that results from such a prioritization exercise is fundamental to getting the best out of IT in general, and virtualization in particular. If your organization is highly dependent on transactional applications, you will require a certain IT environment. Meanwhile, if you are a development shop, your needs will be different.
Have you faced any of the following challenges with your consolidation activities?
% 0
Overhead of maintaining/ patching servers Shortage of physical space to house equipment Under-utilization of servers Dealing with cooling and heat dissipation Overall operational efficiency (cost/resource) The cost of power/ electricity to driver servers Server application provisioning process Server monitoring (performance, health, etc) Availability of power/ electricity to drive servers

20

40

60

80

Figure 3 There are some marked differences between those who have proliferation under control, and those who do not. Percentages relate to respondents rating the issue 4 or 5 on the challenge intensity scale

Those with ongoing or emerging proliferation issues Those that have server proliferation under control

This leads us into the possible virtualization scenarios to consider because it could go a multitude of ways. The first scenario is that virtualization remains in what is - to all intents and purposes, a niche. It could end up a very big niche and indeed from a vendor perspective a very lucrative one but nonetheless one in which virtualized machines sit in their own area, running their own workloads and applications. The second scenario is that virtualization will be a slow and steady burn, evolving into the mainstream rather than being any big bang. Weve seen this happen for a number of technologies which needed so many other pieces to be ready before they could be fully adopted business intelligence or iSCSI to name but two. Other pieces in the path to server virtualization encompass management tools at one end, and appropriate hardware and protocols at the other for example, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and all that can ride on it. Otherwise, we might see an avalanche effect, in the same way that we saw with mobile

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

phones, email, or the Internet. These broad areas were slow starters, but very quickly picked up when they went from a nice-to-have to an expectation. Its not hard to imagine the scenario where it is just expected that virtualization capabilities will exist, and if/when this happens, it could be coupled with a certain sense of urgency. The third, and arguably end game scenario, is that everything is virtualized, management and governance layers improve substantially and we finally achieve the dynamic IT environments, that so many have heralded, for so long. From this perspective, our dynamic IT environments might end up looking like clouds. After all, cloud infrastructures are dynamic virtualized environments, in essence. Once weve all got one of these, matching or at least being compatible with external service providers infrastructures, we can take advantage of everything well ever need in terms of raw processing power, application development platforms, and all the software we ever used in the other scenarios. These scenarios are not exclusive to larger organizations either. For smaller companies perhaps the greater need is to cast virtualization into the environment, such that the more standardized applications and packages can be run on a smaller, easier to manage footprint. For companies of all sizes however, whichever way the virtualization journey takes us, it will require us to take into account what is already there. For some, legacy IT may be a ball and chain, for others it just works, and there is no reason to disrupt it. Taking existing IT into account requires virtualization to be inserted very carefully as a layer.

Fig. Sources
All charts (1) (2) are derived from data gathered via an online survey of 301 IT professionals from the UK, USA, and other geographies in November 2009

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

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An Enterprise Virtualization Primer