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As a technology, virtualization has been around for quite awhile, but server virtualization, as a tool for maintaining business continuity and managing server cost, has given virtualization technology its second wind. Globally, 75% of the 1,221 enterprises surveyed by Forrester said they are aware of server virtualization technologies, 26% had implemented it and 8% more said they expected to have piloted it by summer 2006. With current server utilization estimated to run anywhere from less than 10% to 25%, any technology that can improve server utilization has clear value to enterprises. Virtualization advocates tout as much as 70% server utilization can be achieved. That statistic makes virtualization compelling, but it is not the sole benefit of virtualization. Current users have found other significant benefits—improved business continuity, increased availability of applications and services and improved operational efficiency.
At the same time, while virtualization may be easy to deploy it can create a new level of complexity for IT. Adding clustered environments only compounds the issue. To achieve maximum benefit, implementation may require organizational and financial shifts that are unsettling to your organization as a whole. In addition, virtualization can be as complex to manage as it is easy to grow, leaving businesses with a sense of an infrastructure run amok. Without up-front planning, a great deal of IT staff time might be required later to regain control of the infrastructure, thus eliminating the initial hardware savings.
Virtualized environments are different from physically constrained environments and it is important to address the differences from the start. For example, the relationship between machines and the network increases in complexity as the number of virtual machines embodied in a single host server increases. A single host system failure can affect many business processes—and many more users—increasing the importance of redundancy. Sharing resources in the usual way, by allocating servers to a single organization or function, may not best achieve the goal of high utilization. In fact, a mix of business processes running on a virtual server may more fully utilize the resources and spread usage more evenly over time. These differences require a new way of thinking and cause some organizations to approach virtualization slowly, putting less critical processes into virtualized environments or simply by starting with development environments rather than production.
How can organizations incorporate server virtualization to their benefit and avoid the pitfalls? This paper discusses the broader picture of virtualization benefits and organizational decisions that can influence the amount of benefit achieved. It describes some of the technical challenges inherent in virtualized environments and deployment steps that you can take to avoid some of the pitfalls and to maximize the value of virtualization technology in your organization. The various virtualization technologies this paper covers include the following:
Operating System Virtualization
Virtualized operating systems run on a server with a single host operating system. Multiple operating systems are not supported but overhead is reduced.
Server Virtualization
Virtualized hardware runs multiple guest operating systems. The server does not have a host operating system. Multiple types of operating systems are allowed but overhead is increased.
Clustering
Several locally-attached physical machines provide distributed processing power, while appearing as a single processing resource. It becomes more complicated when:
- multiple vendor technologies are used
- clustering is used within a virtualized environment
Virtualization—A Win-Win-Win
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has added yet another benefit for customers who opt for virtualization—a rebate, limited to $4M per project site. Focused on reducing energy consumption overall, PG&E sees virtualization as a positive step towards conservation and will pay customers based on the annual kilowatt-hour savings resulting from fewer servers in their data centers. Fewer servers use less energy, have reduced cooling requirements, lessen environmental impact and now, bring money in hand. In all, a great deal.
Virtualization Benefits
There are many benefits to virtualization and organizations are eager to become beneficiaries. This section discusses some of them.
Improve Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery
To ensure that business processes are available to meet the demands of the business, many organizations are turning to virtual platforms. Virtualization makes infrastructures flexible. When business processes and services are independent of the hardware they run on, it is easy to move them to other hosts while performing system maintenance or while moving labs and data centers. Disaster recovery plans don’t require complete, duplicate hardware sets; currently active virtualized environments in multiple locations can be configured to accommodate other applications. All this helps you improve business continuity without a large sunk cost.
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