Matthew Shaw

The motivations are strong and compelling when making the choice to move towards virtualization as the solution for your data center.

Some of the factors include:

• Lower energy costs
• Greatly reduced data center physical footprint.
• More efficient use of hardware resources
• High availability
• Business continuity / easier disaster recovery
• Lower admin to server ratio

Before the migration is to move forward a detailed audit of current equipment, platforms, applications, etc must take place. All computing resources must be properly documented and enumerated. All backups need to be made current. If hardware is going to be re-tasked and used in the new virtualization schema, thorough testing needs to be done to assure full functionality and reliability. Read More »

Virtualization technology has made great strides in allowing the creation of the next generation of efficient, easily manageable, highly available, and dynamic data centers. Future developments in virtualization as a technology, the processes involved and hardware technology employed will be impressive and ground-breaking.

Desktop virtualization is a very hot topic these days as companies try to get even more efficient and consolidate resources, make better use of IT administrative hours and deploy desktops based on the needs of individual department tasks and computing requirements. Virtual desktops can be maintained centrally and are versatile when it comes to the end user access. The same virtual desktop used within the building can be accessed remotely.

Virtualization will be explored as an option in areas previously not considered feasible. Cell phone companies are already investigating its applicability in providing multiple phone environments on the same hardware. In the future you could choose your handset and then specify whether you wanted blackberry OS, Windows Mobile, or both. Read More »

To maintain optimal uptime, high availability, and business continuity a comprehensive and up to date disaster recovery plan must be in place and meticulously documented. Disasters can be caused by power outages, human error, and certainly natural disasters. Server or data center downtime can cost the company dearly  whether it be monetary or a negative impact on reputation. Disaster recovery plans must also be tested thoroughly from time to time to make sure they are effective and meet recovery time constraints. In a data center that does not use virtualization this becomes a costly investment. A testing environment must be set up utilizing similar hardware to emulate what is already in place for an accurate test and analysis.

One of the many benefits of virtualization is the ease in which disaster recovery plans can be created and tested. When testing disaster recovery for virtual machines you eliminate the necessity of similar hardware as the VM’s are hardware independent. You can test your recovery plan using machines that have been taken out of production as long as they have the same hypervisor or virtual machine monitor on them.

Furthermore, the need to install the OS and all of the related applications to bring a machine back up is eliminated as virtual machines are just a collection of files that can easily be backed up in their entirety by copying them off (or backing them up) to another location. To restart the backed up virtual machine just copy it over to an operational server and start it up. This greatly reduces the time required for recovery. Read More »

In keeping with the purpose of using virtualization technology the data storage solution must also be resilient and dynamic. Options in tasking and deploying storage for a virtual machine must follow suit with the core technology. Your choice for data storage needs to have high availability and fault tolerance for optimal uptime. Access to the data needs to be fast so as not to affect the performance of the virtual machine. Optimally, the data storage should be easily expandable without creating additional volumes.

The storage technology used and its method of access typically determines if all or parts of the objectives are met and if so, to what degree.

The practice of data storage on the same hardware as the virtual machine is strictly taboo as it defeats the purpose of deploying virtualization in the first place. Virtualization data storage is usually accomplished with Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN). Both forms of storage have their benefits and drawbacks as will be explained later in this article. Read More »

To properly plan for any migration to virtualization, or virtual infrastructure startup, proper capacity and resource planning is paramount. The hardware upon which the virtual platform is to be installed must exceed the processing power, memory capacity, and disk I/O required for the virtual machines as tasked.  Although the ability to dynamically allocate most resources “on the fly” is a benefit of virtualization, a proper measurement for peak usage must be established. Once this is established the need for additional headroom past this point has to be added to hardware requirements thus allowing for future increased demand. Some might say that if the time comes when present hardware resources are no longer able to sustain the workload of the virtual machine(s) new hardware should be purchased to either:

1.     Create similarly tasked virtual machines to share the load.

2.     Migrate the existing virtual machines over to.

Arguments can be made for either scenario but this impasse should never be reached due to poor planning as the negative economic and production impact could result in repercussions that affect business continuity or sustainability. Read More »

Once you have made the decision to deploy virtualization in your computing environment the next choice is whether to use a “Bare Metal” or hosted implementation.

 In a bare metal virtualization solution you are running the Hypervisor on a very sparse Linux install (the majority) or other OS that contains just enough of the core to allow your Hypervisor to run and interact with hardware resources in order to provide the management functions necessary to build, deploy, manage, and interact with your Virtual Machines. The underlying OS is usually part of the install package for your bare metal virtualization platform

 The host model of virtualization requires a full install of a host OS on which the Hypervisor is then installed. The host OS may still run applications and function normally while basically running the Hypervisor as an application albeit a self contained one. Read More »

 

When you take into consideration the number of assets in the form of server hardware the average businesses data center has in place, factor in total cost of ownership and then measure this against the efficiency achieved by said assets in completing the tasks they were deployed for, you get a real good sense of true value. Value is achieved by maximizing output and utilization of each and every server plus reducing administration time and increasing uptime. 

The datacenter model of dedicated servers per function such as separate database, exchange (or email), domain controllers, and application servers is not efficient when compared to the alternative of virtualization. The reasons for the lack of efficiency are reduced server utilization, increased recovery time should a failure occur, and longer time to production on server rollouts to name just a few. All of these reasons also contribute to increased man hours to perform administrative tasks. Read More »