Virtualization has gone beyond the server and the OS. With network and storage virtualization capabilities, IT can assemble and configure a virtual machine instantly; once a virtual machine is in place, IT can delink the application from network and storage infrastructure. This flexibility allows IT management to eliminate time-consuming and tiring storage and network migration projects. The virtual storage pointer can be easily moved from one physical storage device to another. Many companies like 3Leaf Systems, Xsigo, and Cisco (Nuova), are building systems and tools to achieve this capability. Using these technologies developers don't have to build applications that are tightly coupled with network and storage, saving time and resources. There is also savings derived from reducing the number of ports in the server infrastructure, thus reducing the power consumption per server/per rack and per data center.

Figure 1

Through a recent survey done by Symantec (see Figure 1),[4] it is evident that various virtualization technologies are being actively used in data center.

In the same report (see Figure 2) [5], virtualization strategies were considered as key cost containment approaches in the data center.

Figure 2

In the near future, enterprise IT managers will continue to struggle with the decision of where they should or should not...or even at what pace...adopt and deploy a virtual environment. They will have to leverage a framework of the right people, processes, and tools to support a virtualized environment with the hope to speed implementation, eliminate the learning curve, leverage operational efficiencies, and keep OpEx down.

Process
Most IT organizations today are technology providers, delivering to their end users solutions that are custom and built-to-order, adding to the world of technology islands that generally characterize end-user environments. These IT organizations seem to have a catalog of parts that they use to build custom solutions for each particular project or initiative. Within the virtualized environment, IT managers have the capability to outline their approach and build pre-defined configurations that can be delivered as off-the-shelf services. With this transformation, IT managers can now can offer a managed service (platform-as-a-service) powered by a virtual environment.

Taking the factory approach of manufacturing and offering products based on templates, IT managers can now do better capacity planning, and demand forecasting and budgeting to improve predictability and accountability. With this approach, IT managers can be like a portfolio manager with a pool of pre-defined offerings based on underlying instruments (virtual resources) and demand.

It is a well-known fact that process drives workflow and in turn tasks/activities. These tasks and activities can be automated using tools/technologies. Some of the standards bodies like ITIL, COBIT and others are rewriting standards to incorporate virtual environments, so that IT managers can implement standards across their virtual infrastructure. Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is yet an evolving standard, an open industry specification that hopefully vendors will adopt to ease the movement of VM between platforms.

Change management is an important and critical process in regulated industries that have to deal with reams of paperwork and lengthy approvals. Today, the process in the physical environment for documenting a change, managing that change, and the workflow on top of that documentation and management is well understood, but it is difficult in the virtual environment.

Creating metrics, tracking them, and improving them based on feedback always drives efficiencies. Some examples of metrics to incorporate in the plan/process would include parameters such as workload/virtual server, P2V ratio, increase or decrease in staffing levels, and increase/decrease in resources spent.

People
In general, today there is a scarcity of qualified sys admins, network admins, and DBAs. On top of that, a virtual infrastructure requires the limited IT operations staff to further refine their thinking on capacity planning, application performance/tuning, troubleshooting, and security of the new infrastructure. The physical to virtual mix surely adds a certain set of complexity that warrants the admins to acquire these skills and experience. The lines between traditional IT functions are blurring and creating unnecessary confusion.

Since virtual environments consist of three very interdependent environments - the OS, the network, and storage - the "virtualization" administrators need to fully understand all three areas more than traditional administrators. In the absence of such "virtualization" administrators, IT managers should create a virtual team as an overlay to these three areas with security experts in the same virtual team to accomplish the same task.

Virtualization is here to stay and thus IT teams need to be educated and trained about virtualization concepts, enabling all teams to speak the same terminology and syntax. This can be done either by using CBTs, asking your vendor of choice to create virtualization workshops, attending analyst conferences, participating in local user groups, bringing in specialist from other companies to speak to your IT teams, and/or launching small pilot projects. Virtualization is impacting the business as much it is impacting the IT infrastructure, so it is equally important to educate the senior management about the various concepts or virtual infrastructure.

Tools
IT managers are always torn between the choices of adopting new technology to improve efficiency versus not introducing any new technology to increase complexity of their IT environment. Virtualization has been established as a concept/technology that IT managers can no longer avoid, but the tools to manage that infrastructure are still immature and unproven.

Since virtualization stemmed from application development teams using it for development/test/staging environments, virtualization took root in small departments. This resulted in enterprises having multiple flavors of virtualization - open source, Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, etc. Because of this, enterprises adopted tools that supported multiple such environments or at least supported Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix.

The movement of VMs creates an interesting issue of tracking the lineage of the VMs and the templates associated with these VMs. Compared to physical machines, this movement causes issues around audit and compliance. The identity of VMs is lost as well since various templates are used to create these VMs, and as templates change the correlation of VMs and the relevant template is lost and thus hard to track. Embotics is one tool that makes it easier to track the identity and mobility of VMs.

Backing up VMs involves many moving parts and can be challenging - e.g., working around I/O and CPU bottlenecks, new backup options, shrinking backup windows, and new product licensing. Incorporating best-of-breed planning tools like CiRBA, PlateSpin, Symantec, VizionCore, and VMware early on in the virtualization planning process can help IT develop a better backup strategy and architecture that not only protects virtual resources, but leverages new techniques to protect systems better than ever before.

In case an application upgrade or operating system patch causes a virtual server or application crash, a tool like SnapShot from VMware comes in handy. IT can restore the virtual server from a previous state in minutes compared to a complicated physical server tape backup, which can take hours. It helps create multiple snapshots to preserve a server at various points in time and can also allow IT to revert a virtual machine back to a specific snapshot but not all the way back to the beginning state, a function that can be very beneficial.

The issues around monitoring the performance of a virtual infrastructure are not necessarily due to a lack of tools, but a lack of knowledge about what to monitor and how. Companies need tools that cover hardware monitoring, performance monitoring, machine state monitoring, security monitoring, etc. There is no one set of tools today that can efficiently and predictably accomplish the monitoring tasks; however, there is a new generation of tools that can help orchestrate these virtual environments including tools from Q-Layer, AppLogic, vmSight, and Akorri. Most of the legacy tools from HP, IBM and CA are adding features to incorporate virtual infrastructure and provide the visibility around the virtual environment.

Conclusion
Before adopting virtualization you should spend time planning and deciding on the approach and architecture that lowers the overall pain associated with a pre-virtualization environment. By carefully considering the framework of people, processes, and tools that would support the virtualized environment, companies can be better positioned to derive business value from the virtual infrastructure, including lower CapEx, reduced power consumption in the data centers, optimized space requirements, and improved operational efficiencies.

References

1. Laurianne McLaughlin, "Study: IT Wants More Virtualization Management Tools," CIO (November 16, 2007).
2. Gartner Data Center Conference, 2007.
3. Rackspace\Virtualization Survey, August 2007.
4. Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007.
5. Ibid.