Real Life Scenarios – The Virtual Zone
Hello everyone,
Virtualization has played a part in the enterprise for decades, but only
Welcome to another exciting edition of Progress.
recently has it taken on new urgency as organizations wrestle with information technology (IT) infrastructure sprawl, skyrocketing energy bills,
Virtualization seems to be another breakthrough in the technological
cooling challenges, and data center space constraints. Initially a mainframe
front. It has been transforming computing from data centers to desktops
phenomenon, virtualization has emerged as the preferred strategy of
from systems to servers. It is surely another advent in the IT Sector.
organizations everywhere. Today many organizations are still feeling their
A changing business environment demands Simplifying and paced up IT
way toward virtualization and learning many lessons along the way. As an IT
responses which could be made possible by Virtualization. It is
strategy, virtualization is more than simply a product to buy. There are a
changing the way resources are deployed and managed. It is inclined
number of different approaches to virtualization. Before you get started, you
toward overall savings on hardware, environmental costs, management,
need to think about the problem you are trying to solve. In addition,
and administration of the server infrastructure. Virtualization seems to
organizations embarking on virtualization need to think about managing the
be a way to get your IT greener and contribute in saving environment by
virtualized environment, high availability and disaster recovery, hardware
saving energy and minimizing the cooling solutions.
sizing, network fabric planning, and more.
An organization looks out for easy accessibility and encapsulation of the
The problems most organizations are currently trying to solve with
existing applications in diverse environment. Virtualization ensures
virtualization include the high cost and constrained availability of energy, the need to reduce data center heat to lower air conditioning costs, and
improved system compliance. With escalating competitiveness in the market business houses needs to get along with the pace of growing market and virtualization might be help to move towards the accelerating journey. Go virtual Go green!!
overcrowding in the data center. The solution generally comes down to server, storage, and network infrastructure consolidation. With the extremely high power prices, it is critical for an organization to create efficient usage of electricity. Since virtualization utilizes an existing server to implement additional functionality, no additional electricity is
With all the best wishes meet you in next edition.
required. Each virtualized server that is implemented can save an
Prateek Garg MD & CEO
organization three to six hundred dollars per year. In addition, the average cost to cool a server is approximately four hundred per year. Since virtual servers utilize existing resources, no additional cooling would be required
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Power Consumption & Storage Area The government and power companies are attempting to reduce the electricity that corporations are using. For this reason, most power companies offer rebate plans for organizations that utilize virtual servers. Often, these rebates can be up to fifty percent of the implementation of virtual servers. It is important to recognize that one must contact the utility company to perform a survey before the conversion process initiates. As well, local, state, and the federal government offer deductions on these energy efficient systems. The savings does not stop at the electricity, servers often cost from twenty-five hundred dollars and more to purchase. As well, it is required to purchase the software that those servers operate. Utilizing the virtualization software, an organization can save up to seventy-five percent off the enterprise license per year through Microsoft. Since the machines are virtualized, there is no need for expanded computer rooms, causing a less expensive office area with less room is required to operate the same functionality.
Mobility Another problem organizations are solving with virtualization is infrastructure availability. With server virtualization, for example, you can use mobility instead of taking down servers. By mobility, means the ease of moving virtual servers between physical servers in a cluster. When a physical server needs maintenance, the virtual servers are easily moved to another physical server without interrupting service to the users. Through the use of a storage area network (SAN), the administrators do not even have to redirect the storage. Advanced virtualization software will even automatically move virtual servers to another server in the cluster in the event of a failure. The faster you can move a virtual machine, the easier it is to solve business continuity problems. Virtual machines are very easy to move over a network; everything is encapsulated in a single file. And when the data is on the SAN, "you can move the server without even moving the data store.
Virtualization in IT In addition to the physical savings that can be experienced, virtualization improves efficiency in the information technology department. Administration costs are lowered, as there is less physical hardware to monitor. In addition, one server can provide access to many functions. This improves efficiency since an administrator is not required to jump from one system to another while resolving issues. This has the potential to reduce response times up to ninety percent. An overall savings from the efficiency increase of the IT department can reach thirty percent.When a system does fail, the recovery time is achieved within minutes, rather than long periods. This is because the server is not required to perform various hardware checks when a system fails. Applications find two major features including an uptime of ninety-nine point nine percent on ninety percent of the machines. In addition, one hundred percent of software will be protected under a disaster recovery plan.
Virtualization as a technology is a step towards the redesign of how IT is delivered and consumed by customers. The transformation of organizations from business units towards a virtual business process-driven architecture is supported by the adoption of infrastructure virtualization. The key “Virtualization as a benefits of IT virtualization can be technology helps organizations characterized in the following to consolidate their scattered IT generic ways: resources and manage them centrally with better security, scalability and • It increases the IT department's redundancy. It also increases the ability to be more agile and flexibility of IT Team to keep pace with flexible with the allocation of the current business demands and deliver the same in a more resources, enabling high-priority agile manner.” tasks to be guaranteed the resources Ashish Khanna needed to meet service level Oberoi Group agreements (SLAs). • It can reduce operational IT costs and improve the financial return organizations can expect to receive from their IT investments. • It improves the quality of service that customers, both internal and external, can expect from IT. • It reduces energy consumption, which enables organizations to reduce their carbon footprint. • It is a stepping stone towards an adaptive IT infrastructure paradigm, where internal IT capacity is augmented by additional external resources to meet both expected and unexpected peak demands.
Why Desktop Virtualization is a must There will always be a multitude of underutilized desktop computers in most of the organizations such as IT companies and businesses in the service sector. Unfortunately, while these computing devices' storage and system performance have been optimized, they are only performing at a fraction of their capacities. This is a common premise across any industry, making it financially unsound to continue purchasing new desktop computers during company-wide changes “The potential to reduce response times like employee expansions and up to ninety percent. An hardware refresh cycles. overall savings from the Instead, most institutions efficiency increase of the IT department can reach have put into place various thirty percent.” technologies to keep the Rajesh Sachdeva system performance optimal, Practice Lead Progressive Infotech while focusing on reducing costs. One such technology being leveraged on by IT support teams is desktop virtualization. It essentially consolidates the capabilities and resources of multiple desktop computers into a centralized server. Here, access to the data infrastructure, set of applications and system resources are distributed to remote devices like workstations, notebook PCs, smartphones and thin client terminals. With this kind of set up, companies from enterprises to small
and medium-sized businesses can gain a strong competitive edge with regard to data security, disaster recovery, and service availability. Given its many benefits, there are many industry-specific scenarios where virtualization will prove to be a critical solution. Many of these can be vital for the IT services staff on many aspects of the business – from the entire production floor to the data center. Here are some of them.
5 Tips to pick your Virtualization Solution In the current shaky yet slowly recovering economic climate, companies are forced to pinch their pennies and make strategic compromises with regard to the technologies and other factors being utilized within the workplace. This is something organizations, from small and medium-sized businesses to major IT companies, have to contend with. And these days, nothing embodies a logical implementation with multiple benefits and a cost-effective overhead quite like virtualization. With all these, it's not hard to see why more and more companies are virtualizing the workplace. So if your IT services team has decided to leverage on its technologies, all you need now is to choose which solution out there to procure.
Conduct a Assessment
Virtualization
Virtualization will bring about a lot of changes for any organization, from a technical standpoint. Conduct a detailed assessment of your data infrastructure, along with the specific operating systems and tasks served by every hardware component in every department. This will give you an overview of the varied specifications within the workplace, and you can decide which ones can be virtualized for performance and optimization for further productivity. For instance, desktop virtualization may just be the ideal solution for an upcoming large-scale employee expansion, letting you establish new user information and storage into the infrastructure without the need to purchase new computers.
Weigh Your Options Using your assessment as your guide, you can start scouring the market for the right solution provider for your virtualization needs. And there are a lot in the market today, with the likes of VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix at the forefront. Review each option based on the following attributes:
1.Scalability. The best solutions out there should not require additional hardware components right out of the box, but are fully capable of accommodating expansions in the future. With this in mind, inspect the supported operating systems, number of input and output ports, and storage bays. 2.Implementation. Installations at server level can be quick; but implementing the virtualization suite to a large user base can sometimes take time; even more so when rolling out server virtualization for conglomerates with datacenters and server farms. Find the solution that's easy to roll out and offers seamless integration with the existing data infrastructure. 3.Customization. While every virtualization solution offers a fine lineup of features, there will also be limitations—from operating system constraints to hardware compatibility issues. Find out if the service providers or vendors have anything to remedy these restrictions or if there are any configuration settings that can be adjusted to suite your needs.
4.Simplified Operations. As with the nature of virtualization, it's important to find the solution that will optimize the existing hardware and software resources while simplifying the general data environment and its day-to-day operations. As such, it should require very little training for both the intended end-users and the IT services team handling the back-end.
5.After Sales Support. Aside from the acquisition and stability within your infrastructure, also take into consideration the maintenance, software updates, repair, and replacements parts. Finding a solution that offers a stable virtualization infrastructure would indeed be beneficial in the long run.
“These days nothing embodies a logical implementation with multiple benefits and a cost-effective overhead quite like virtualization.” Saurab Tiwari Practice Lead Progressive Infotech.
5. Mandated that the default platform for all future applications
Case study
would be the 3PAR/VMware platform
Problem Rich Avila did a survey of the equipment in the data center, and concluded that the utilization of the servers was less than 6%. They had been installed using an ad hoc process to meet the projected needs of computer projects all over the university. The storage management was also adhoc, with most of the storage being attached directly to servers, and some centralized storage on two small Storage Area Networks (SANs). The utilization of the storage was also very low (10-15%), and the spare capacity could not be used by
The users were informed that over the spring and summer of 2008 their equipment would be migrated to a virtual server on a specific date. If the operations group did not hear back (this was the case for the majority), the equipment was migrated to VMware on that date. If there was an objection to the date, operations negotiated a new target date with strong pressure on the user groups to help solve the power and environmental problems of CSUEB.
other applications that were running out of storage. The bottom line of Rich's findings was that the IT equipment was vastly underutilized, and the aging equipment was power inefficient.
Result As of October 2008, 25 servers have been shut down, 17 NAS servers have been migrated to the 3PAR equipment and VMware and turned off, and 21 new applications that would
Servers Beyond Their Expected Life
have required additional servers have been installed on
100%
3PAR/VMware with another 15 new applications on track to
80%
also be installed. The old SAN equipment has been migrated to
60%
Under 5 yrs
the 3PAR storage, and will be removed. So far, power
40%
Over 5 yrs
consumption has been reduced by 26% -- from 67kVA to 50kVA — even after adding 21 new applications, with more to come.
20%
“Our power crisis has been averted” said Rich Avila.
0% FY02/03 FY03/04
FY04/05 FY05/06 FY06/07
The S400 storage equipment from 3PAR was a key component of the virtualization strategy. The 3PAR equipment virtualizes
Solution Jonathon Taylor is an environmental studies student at CSUEB and was writing a research paper on making data centers more efficient and green. He was also working as a systems engineer in the CSUEB data center, and used the data center at CUSEB as a reference model. He recommended virtualization as a key component of a strategy to reduce power consumption, and presented this paper to his CIO, John Charles. John's response: “Do it; now.” To solve the problem, CSUEB operations group did five things: 1. Installed three Sun Fire 4600 servers to run VMware and provide the server backbone of a virtualized server environment 2. Installed a 3PAR S400 with 92 disk drives and 43 terabytes of virtualized storage to be the backbone of the virtualized storage environment 3. Implemented VMware to provide virtualized servers in place of physical devices 4. Began migrating servers and storage to VMware and 3PAR, starting with the oldest and least used servers
the storage, which allows all the disk to be used, and data to be moved dynamically as required. “What prompted the decision to go with 3PAR was the fact that they do thin provisioning ," Jonathon Taylor explains, adding that the University expects to virtualize 100 of its servers by 2009. “That allows us to save a lot of energy.” In addition, a feature called thin provisioning was used, which allows the servers to think that they have a large amount of disk space, but the 3PAR storage array only provides real storage when data is actually written. The combination of 3PAR's storage virtualization and thin provisioning allow the amount of disk required on the 3PAR equipment to be only 20% of the storage required on the original equipment, even after the addition of several new applications. Wikibon did a detailed analysis on the savings from virtualization and thin provisioning, and found that the average ratio between virtual storage and real storage was 4:1
7 Great Uses for Virtualization Server virtualization is an extremely powerful tool that can help you make the most out of your server environment. But just how exactly can you benefit by going virtual, here are top seven uses for virtualization 1. Multiple OS's on one system. Your entire infrastructure is run on Linux servers, except this one legacy ASP application that requires a small Windows box. A dedicate separate hardware for this where you can just put a virtual Windows machine on a server 2. Go green! You might have a few servers in your environment that aren't being fully utilized. Condense them as virtual machines on a single physical server. This eco-friendly solution helps you “go green” by putting money in your wallet—it costs you less to use less hardware and build out virtual servers. 3. Develop a project or a website in virtual space first. Virtualization makes it easy to create new development environments, or maintain staging environment that synchronize with your live servers— a developer's paradise. 4. Software testing and evaluation. Create virtual sandboxes on the fly, allowing you to try new software in a safe environment. After all, you wouldn't want to install a program that corrupts your current programs on your production servers, right? 5. Migration from one physical machine to another without loss of service. Combine a virtual server with a shared storage device, and you get one of the greatest benefits that virtualization has to offer: hardware independence. Is it time to upgrade to the newest processor, more memory, and more horsepower. 6. Backup and recovery. Because your virtual server is just a single system file, you can easily create a backup copy of your entire VM. So if things go wrong, just scrap the whole VM and reload the saved backup copy. 7. Training: use virtual machines to train your IT staff. Virtualization gives you the power to let your staff train on an exact replica of your production environment, without the worry that they'll irreversibly break something.
With Progressive
Virtualization is significant as it provide:
Reduce your expenses,
•
Server unification and infrastructure maximization.
• •
Reduction in cost of infrastructure. Enhances flexible functionality of management.
• •
High accessibility of applications and data. Improves system compliance.
Reduce IT Infrastructure manageability clutter! Ensure flexibility, accessibility and efficiency!
With Progressive •
Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
•
Make different environments compatible to run collaboratively through integration, creating a virtual PC environment.
•
Increase ROI by enhancing energy efficiency & requiring less hardware, reducing maintenance activities resulting in lesser administrators/server.
•
Ensure highest level of availability & manageability, for all business applications.
•
Improve enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment and fewer support calls due to application conflicts.
•
Disaster recovery solutions add further robustness in maintaining business continuity and deliver high accessibility throughout the datacenter.
Green IT Contribute to the environment by making your IT green. Use virtualization reduce IT equipment power consumption. Lessening the cooling solutions infrastructure.
Go virtual Go green! Go virtual Go green!