White paper
By Tim Fishcher
For most large Canadian enterprises in 2009 the question is not if virtualization will be adopted into their infrastructure, but when. For many enterprises, virtualization is already helping businesses achieve significant cost reductions through better resource utilization, smaller energy bills and lower ongoing acquisition costs. More significantly, virtualization is helping organizations be more flexible by making it easier to scale IT resources, respond to service issues and build better backup and disaster recovery functionality.
If the decision to embrace virtualization is obvious, perhaps the more compelling question confronting IT leaders heading down this road for the first time is, “Where do I begin?” Whether for desktop and application needs, data centre server sprawl or storage growth, well established virtualization technologies exist to address these challenges. What should be addressed first to maximize the benefits to the organization?
This white paper identifies the opportunities and choices confronting IT leaders today, and provides recommendations to help you get to the solution you need.
Achieving the benefits of virtualization
The key benefit of virtualization is the flexibility it provides to organizations. IT professionals have long struggled to address new business challenges in a timely fashion while at the same time ensuring that the current infrastructure continues to deliver the services the organization needs on a day-to-day basis. The focus has been to manage cost, which in turn has led to rationalization efforts and measurable SLAs.
The downside, however, has been that complex architectures have sometimes been locked into solution silos. As a result, organizations typically spend 80 percent of their time and effort on managing, supporting or servicing existing assets and too little time focused on application development, innovation or big picture strategy.
The goal is to move to a scenario where IT is focused on the timely delivery of solutions – where applications, server solutions and storage are all dynamically provisioned without lengthy acquisition and change control processes. The promise of virtualization is that it allows resources to be deployed much more rapidly through such methods as isolation, partitioning, and encapsulation of solution components.
Are you ready to virtualize your infrastructure?
The best candidates to virtualize are organizations that have already reaped the benefits of rationalizing their IT infrastructure. Through standardization, they have begun to ensure that the right application tools are being provided to the right class of users. They are also achieving economies of scale in their server deployments as they adopt a shared storage approach to their information management requirements. For enterprises still in the middle of a major rationalization effort, virtualization is certainly a viable option, but it does add a layer of complexity to the migration of your infrastructure.
Typically a virtualization strategy emerges from the rationalization process. This response is driven by the need to address the growing complexity of the delivery environment that inhibits flexibility, and the sheer capacity issues involved in gathering a number of production systems into one physical space.
Acquiring new physical space in the data centre can be prohibitively expensive. Increasing power demands only add to costs, and cooling all those whirring fans and spinning disks is another growing issue. Nor does rationalization necessarily lead to greater efficiency. Servers are often utilized at a rate of only 10-20 percent and most storage is over-deployed by a factor of two, not to mention the migration issues that arise once allocated space runs out.
On the user demand side, hardware and operating systems often need to be updated or replaced to drive the new software solutions that users are demanding. Even as packaged off-the-shelf solutions proliferate, there are still ever-increasing demands from the user community for customization and personalization. Are there more effective choices to meet these user demands and requirements? Absolutely. This is where virtualization can pay real dividends.
Virtualization: Taking a unified approach
As demand for IT resources grows, IT departments are looking to virtualization to help in three main areas: application delivery, server consolidation and storage provisioning.
Application delivery
The choices in application delivery really revolve around selecting the most effective method for delivering an application solution to an end user. Ideally the delivery of this application will allow you to update, patch or replace the application tool quickly and effectively as business needs dictate.
There are three core architecture approaches to this problem:
- Server-based application delivery
- Virtual desktops, and
- Application/desktop streaming
Server based application delivery – In the PC world, this is the solution which has been available the longest. Using shared server capacity, each application is installed on a server and made available for clients to attach. The application runs in a shared environment on the server. While this requires the user to always attach to the server to run the application, it does allow application changes to be made quickly at the server. As there are sometimes issues with individual applications conflicting with each other on a given server, application server solutions are often implemented in silos to avoid these conflicts.
Virtual desktops – Virtual desktops use server based-virtualization to offer individual desktops to connected users. A user connects to a virtual desktop server and a desktop is made available to them. Each application required by the user is installed on the virtual desktop, again giving IT a simple way to maintain applications in a diverse user community. There is less conflict, as each image represents one user's set of solutions. This approach does not eliminate management issues as virtual files/desktops still require patches just as discrete systems do.
Application / desktop streaming – A third approach is to package the application as a separate entity and run it in a protected sandbox on the user's current desktop/access device. As opposed to the first two architectures, a streamed application uses the local processor and display drivers to drive the application. This is a good solution for knowledge workers who might require more sophisticated, higher-end computing resources or for those who need to be able to work offline. It does require the user to attach once to obtain the application, but after that they can just check in to validate that they should continue to use their application or whether there is a newer application package to obtain. This check-in mechanism allows the organization to disable the application once the authorization to run the package expires.
An interesting combination is to use application streaming in conjunction with the other two application delivery methods to add another layer of flexibility. In this scenario packaged applications are streamed to the shared or virtual desktop. This allows the application to be managed separately from the virtual access method.
Server consolidation
The current marketplace for x86 type virtualization is rapidly evolving as major vendors introduce new tools and work towards agreement on standards. However, if your server farms need to be replaced or updated or you are confronting the challenge of data centre sprawl, the savings and ROI are real and you should consider virtualizing now.
Beyond the short-term benefits of lower power costs and better server utilization, virtualization will benefit the organization in the longer term by increasing the flexibility with which it can allocate computing resources. This is very useful for testing and application development activities, which enhances the organization's ability to introduce innovative new services and applications.
In the coming 18 months the key battleground among vendors will be the strength of the toolsets they offer to manage and support the virtual environments their customers are creating. Among these will be the solutions that leverage the virtual environment to provide easier backup, fail-over and provisioning services will be critical differentiators between vendors.
Storage provisioning
The next step for organizations completing initial rationalization efforts is to consider the pros and cons of virtualization technologies such as thin-provisioning, archiving and tiered storage and how they can assist in storage provisioning.
Thin provisioning enables just-in-time approach – Thin provisioning covers technology solutions which allow us to provision storage for servers and applications in a just-in-time fashion. Rather than trying to predict and provision a lifetime of storage, we can provision the storage virtually and either grow it over time or oversubscribe the physical storage for the application – telling it that it has more storage available than current physical disks. Over time, as real storage approaches the physical limits, additional physical storage can be provisioned within the logical storage that was allocated initially.
Archiving supports more flexible data retrieval – Archiving consists of using data classification techniques to decide what data needs to be available, to whom, when, and for how long. The data is made available via virtualized services in such a way that the individual retrieving the data doesn't know – or need to know – the identity or physical location of the particular storage device on which the data resides, regardless of whether it is primary, secondary or tertiary storage such as tape or public storage utility services. Archiving can be used to support various requirements, including compliance, cost avoidance and mobility services.
Tiered storage maximizes access speeds for the most valuable data – Tiered storage uses differing levels of potentially diverse heterogeneous storage – keeping the most frequently accessed data on the highest performance storage resources and moving less frequently accessed information to older or cheaper storage. Virtualization technologies help to make these migrations non-disruptive to the production environment, thereby reducing downtime.
One additional benefit commonly cited for storage virtualization is that the virtualization layer (over heterogeneous hardware) adds a simpler, single point of management for the entire storage infrastructure. This makes day-to-day storage tasks simpler to complete than having to use multiple vendor tools.
A specific benefit of virtualization in the NAS space (file virtualization) is that once again the virtualization technology abstracts the underlying storage devices and presents one unified namespace – a single directory – for all the file storage available. This makes file management a single point of control for the storage administrator.
The primary vendors in this market space have been developing technologies to support full heterogeneous storage virtualization for almost ten years. Their efforts have been hampered, however, by chip-level performance which has not been able to support the growth in storage. In theory out-of-band storage virtualization was a workable solution but it could not scale high enough for I/O configurations.
Another alternative, in-band storage virtualization, also faces limitations. In addition to chip level performance issues, it also requires full standards-based interoperability among all components – a high hurdle to overcome. Still other vendors virtualize behind the storage array where, instead of an end-to-end configuration, they rely on interdependency certifications between only the array and the sub-array.
Each of these technologies is effective, and we can work with you to determine which solution best meets your current and future requirements. Keep in mind that by allocating storage more efficiently, virtualization can decrease the rate of expected storage growth. That means, if done right, virtualization allows you to get better use of your current storage capacity and reduce future hardware acquisition costs.
Be ready: Prepare now to virtualize your infrastructure
Virtualization is about helping organizations build flexibility into their IT infrastructure to leverage computing resources to meet its business objectives.
It's about more than just cutting costs. Ideally, virtualization should reduce the amount of time IT staff spend on maintenance and increase their ability to focus more on value added activities such as application development and strategic planning.
The first step towards virtualization is identifying your most pressing needs. Is it storage? Is it applications? Is it network optimization? Regardless, preparing for virtualization has to begin with a basic inventory of IT assets. With this in hand, then you can begin to assess total cost of ownership and develop your business case for virtualization.
As for the implementation plan, it has to be related to, and help address, overall business objectives. As well, it must have clearly defined expectations both for the short term and for how it will help make the organization more nimble, efficient and innovative in the long run.
The key to a successful virtualization is more than selecting the right vendor offering. It's about ensuring your people have the capacity and the tools to manage and support the virtualized environment. If you're not sure where to start, complete our needs assessment, which can help you determine:
- Whether virtualization is a good fit for your enterprise
- What you need to consider in making the move to virtualization
- What platform is right for you, and
- How quickly you can expect to see ROI
Download needs assessment now.
To find out more about how Bell can help your organization implement virtualization, contact your Bell representative or use the link below to have a Bell representative contact you.
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About the author
Tim Fischer, Associate Director, Bell, has worked for Bell for 10 years and has more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing complex IT solutions. His specific areas of expertise include systems and storage, security and enterprise resiliency.