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Is Virtualization Right for Your Business?

On balance I think it’s very clear that virtualization offers huge cost advantages for small to moderate sized business that can allocate IT budgets more effectively using virtualized hosting and other services.   There are also different but major benefits for enterprise level businesses where server needs can be reduced significantly using various virtualization techniques.

As internet travel publishers we’ve had many experiences with both the challenges and the pitfalls of partial virtualization, especially for DNS and hosting services and indirectly as participants in cloud based storage of photos, blogs, and email.   Our small infrastructure needs meant that virtualization issues with our own small number of servers were not of much consequence.

Virtualization + Cloud Services = Big Savings

For hosting and DNS there are generally large cost benefits in virtualized server environments. this type of virtualization can be combined with cloud services like email and documents to offer a business exceptional savings.  This approach is especially suited to small businesses that do not need or can’t afford a local server and network but require 24/7 website and online services uptime.  Even a tiny business can easily manage a website, blog, email, and documents for trivial to *zero costs* thanks to environments like WordPress or Google free hosting and blogs, Google or other free document services, and Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google free mail services. Read More »

 

Virtualization Background

I have a few years of experience using virtual servers.  Early on, virtualization was so complicated to implement and maintain that it only made sense for those organizations with the most dire need for software segmentation or other complex architectural needs.  Virtualization is so easy now that implementation is almost an afterthought.  I am currently implementing several virtual servers on a massive grid as part of a major virtualization effort at my organization.  Virtualization has definitely come a long ways since my earliest experiences, and the value it can provide to me and my coworkers is now much more obvious.

Direct Benefits of Virtualization

Virtualization is expected to directly provide me and my coworkers with the following benefits:

1.  Easy-to-manage future hardware upgrades.  The virtual machine operations folks can just add processor power, disk space or RAM to our configuration instantly at any time, at a near zero cost compared to the complexity involved in roll out a new physical server in our very large server environment (many thousands of servers).  Conversely, if a piece of physical hardware that is connected into the grid dies, it can be swapped out without shutting down any of the virtual servers, yielding a far greater “hardware uptime” end-user experience.  The hardware still dies just like it always does, but it doesn’t affect the performance of the software in as significant a way as if a single system dies and takes some application down.  For those who have never had a direct hardware failure, remember virtualization when it happens to you (and it will happen one day!) Read More »

The common concept of server virtualization has grown through breaking new technologies before years to a point today, when server virtualization vendors tend to implement similar features with minor innovation. There are two virtualization features in my mind which could be the next move in IT virtualization:

Application-Centric Virtualization

Virtualization systems today work with operating systems. They support deploying virtual machines, failing them over to another physical hardware when disaster strikes, they optimize physical memory utilization and many more OS-related tasks. What is more, the virtualization platform can deploy new operating system automagically, according preset scenarios. Well, where’s a problem?

It’s application, not operating system what the end users really need to work with. They need the application interface to be available on demand, to respond fast, to stay available should one of company’s facilities fail. And there are many services like databases, fileservers, mail stores and other which that application interface depend on. And it’s the operating system at the end of this application dependency chain.

This means we have a mature technology available to cover the last link of chain. Now it’s time to move operating systems’ role to background, wher they’ll provide a simple runtime environment for applications. Let’s move the focus to applications and let them be managed through the same interfaces we use to manage virtual servers. Read More »

Business does not care about virtualization.  Executives do not care about VMWare, IBM, Sun, and Microsoft.  The business cares about their business:  maximizing profits for the short and long term.  This is accomplished by focusing on and improving various aspects of the business and how it operates.  Each one of these can be improved upon with virtualization technology.

Ways to maximize profits:

• Reduce costs
• Increase productivity and output
• Be resilient to risk
• Attract and retain customers

Reduce costs

Many costs are incurred by IT departments.  These include money spent on electricity, hardware, staff support time, deployment time, and disaster costs to name a few.  Virtualization can reduce all of these expenses.  Virtual storage on SANs will only allocate storage used, making it easier to manage and increasing utilization of storage.  100% of allocated space is used instead of a storage manager having to juggle space between LUNs and decide whether to overallocate or manage storage more frequently.  Virtualization allows several server operating systems to be hosted on one piece of physical server hardware which increases its utilization.  All of those unused clock cycles and memory are now being utilized to the fullest saving real dollars by not having to buy a physical server for each system that demands a dedicated server OS. Read More »

I have a belief that, one day, I will be able to go home at a reasonable time nearly every day. The process of working late into the night performing upgrades or migrations makes my family life difficult and a personal life almost impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working hard and putting in the hours when needed, but when an upgrade goes wrong and you work all night, missing a personal or family event, well, that is hard.

Virtualisation is a solution to that problem. I can take a “snapshot” of my server before the upgrade, make a copy of it, then start work. Then at 10PM when the team is tired, we can make a decision to “roll back”. Then migrate back to the copy of the server disk image or snapshot and….. go home.

More recently, for certain types of server software, we have been performing the upgrades on a copy of the virtual server in lab environments. We take a snapshot of the Virtual Hard Disk, move it into a lab virtual server, and then run the upgrade procedure. As we find problems (there is always a problem isn’t there?) we read the manuals, contact tech support, communicate with the developers, get external resources or any of other myriad things that can fix the problems. 

Previously, we were restoring from tape, or a backup on a SAN. And this could take hours to do the rollback. The temptation to keep pushing through the problem. Read More »

 

At my last job each developer had their own personal development system. Since it was a military-affiliated command, there were 3 separate networks that required development efforts. There was on server where code was stored in a repository for community access. The command did have thin-client terminal systems for most users but the developers couldn’t use them because of the work that they performed.

Because each developer had 3 personal computer systems, space was at a premium. It also meant that special privileges had to be set up for everyone so they could have Administrator access to the computers to install software for testing and compatibility research.

One problem that we ran into was making sure everyone had the necessary version of software for testing and development. There was no central file server that had the software the developers required so everyone was on their own to ensure their systems were up to date.

Additionally, since each developer programmed on his local systems, there was no data redundancy in case of a system failure and there were no policies or procedures to back up data on a regular basis. Network profiles enabled each person to have a network “hard drive” for personal data storage; these profiles were backed up with the normal server backups. However, no one trusted them for important file storage because network problems could prevent access when needed and there was no way to synchronize the files between the local hard drive and the profile. Read More »

Virtualization of IT systems decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources, hiding complexity and enabling new capabilities. However, not all potential benefits of virtualization have meaningful value outside IT circles: Too many of our discussions revolve around the very complexity that virtualization technology should be hiding! True business value is derived from transformed virtual resources in the next-generation data center, not the incremental capacity gains of virtual servers. But how will we get there, and what will this future look like?

The Problem with Virtual Servers

Implementation of virtualization technology to date has merely delivered condensation of physical resources: 250 physical servers are condensed onto 20 physical servers, but 250 virtual server images remain. True, this does result in the reduction of data center footprint, from rack space to power and cooling, enabling moderate cost savings. But these are not examples of real consolidation, let alone business transformation.

Many have lamented this “virtual server sprawl” and suggested alternative methods of consolidating low-utilization applications into larger, more flexible “resource servers”. For example, numerous SQL servers can be combined on a single central server with more focused management. But these larger resource servers are not normally virtualized since their concentrated I/O demands can overtax current server virtualization platforms. Therefore, consolidation and virtualization remain separate. Read More »

The benefits of virtulization come directly from the flexibility that it allows.

There are three scenarios discussed here that show what the flexibility of some form of VM solution can provide.

1.  Disaster Recovery Opportunities.

Traditional DR strategies around failover, system and whole site replication and third site options rely on similar server and operating systems to make them viable. Data recovery is a problem solved long ago and IT operations are more than familiar with incremental backups, snapshots and recovery.  As more businesses begin to realise that systems/applications are increasingly mission critial the applications themselves need to be more resilient.  
    
Having to have replicated server environments for Windows, Unix and/or Linux means that many Data Centres are over designed and carrying unused capacity just in case one architecture dependent application fails.
    
This is where the power of virtualization becomes a tangible benefit. Owning or leasing some short term capacity in it’s cheapest form (either Windows or Linux) could be a solution for many enterprises.  In essence all you need to buy is CPU time and memory to host a guest VM soltion of your application.  The data may be in the cloud or on portable storage that can be easily accessed by the stood up virtualized platfrom. Read More »