An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

Team Register

In association with
Introduction
In a busy IT department, it can be all too easy to lose sight of how tactical additions to the
IT environment build up over the years. The incumbent workhorse servers plough on day
after day in the dark corner of the data center, while new exciting projects take center
stage and get shiny new servers to run on. Then, one day, you turn round and find you’ve
got several hundred applications to support across a range of departments, and, of
course, a myriad of under utilized servers.
Server sprawl is all too common. Major applications and web-facing services can often
require an entire server landscape of their own. Even smaller, more-focused applications
require certain amount of horse-power. And this should come as no surprise to anyone;
for years now, vendors and industry experts have recommended dedicated servers for
dedicated services.

If you add up everything in the boxes, racks, and

blade chassis, how many physical x86 servers would
you say exist in your infrastructure?
Figure 1
% 0 20 40 60 80 100
It is typical of larger organisations to have many
Over 1,000 employees
hundreds of servers in place, sometimes even
50-1,000 employees thousands, and it is not uncommon for smaller
Under 50 employees organizations at the other end of the scale to be
running tens of servers.
Over 1,000 servers 50 to 1,000 servers
10 to 50 servers Under 10 servers

Server sprawl has been a part of the IT landscape for years and inevitably works to the
detriment of the organization by making routine tasks, such as patch management,
application provisioning, and general monitoring and management, increasingly bloated
overheads.
But that’s all gradually changing thanks to server virtualization.

Where is server virtualization taking us?

Server virtualization comes in a variety of shapes and forms, depending on the size of
your organization, the scale of the operations you run, and your operational suitability to
virtualization.
The majority of workloads that have been virtualized to date are what we might refer to
as the ‘easy operational targets.’ They’re either self-contained workloads, low risk systems,
or those that would feel an immediate benefit from a move to virtualization.
The vision of virtualization, however, is something far greater. Virtualization done correctly
could and should deliver:
• Improvements to the management of available physical capacity
• Improved control of (virtual) machines
• Simplified operational management of the virtual server pool
• Reduced risk due to the flexibility improvements for business continuity

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

 • Dynamically scalable resources to meet demands
These benefits are of huge appeal to IT departments the world over, although recognizing
them is not necessarily straight forward. As virtualization projects are moving out of the
pilot phase into more mainstream use, you can see organizations hitting road blocks to a
major roll-out. This can be because of bottlenecks in operations or infrastructure, skill set
challenges, or broader manageability concerns. Careful planning can help avoid some
of these pitfalls

Operational benefits of virtualization

If people are typically seeing server virtualization ratios of 5:1 – admittedly, the more
experienced seem to be aiming considerably higher - then that suggests an awful lot
of servers are being virtualized. Given that most people are starting with application
virtualization – leaving databases and security solutions to later projects – then we must
assume that projects with consolidation as an end goal are reaching maturity. Therefore,
it’s time to look at the operational benefits that can be gained from virtualization – and
crucially how to gain them.

Focusing on x86 servers in particular, roughly what

consolidation ratios do you typically achieve or
expect on average?
% 0 10 20 30 40 50

2:1 Figure 2
5:1
10:1
Consolidation ratios of between 5:1 and 10:1 are
typically achieved with x86 server consolidation.
20:1
50:1
Higher
Unsure / NA

Let’s look at the obvious potential benefits first: improved server utilization. If you’ve
got a room full of under-utilized servers then, yes, you’re probably very quickly going to
start feeling some operational benefits by virtue of consolidation and the fact that you
no longer need to manage so many boxes. Equally, if you have power and cooling
constraints, consolidation can give you a decent operational boost by enabling you to
use these services more efficiently. Presumably, that means you’re going to be clearing
some floor space and using fewer expensive switches and ports too – or potentially using
them more efficiently at least.
Add all of that together and the theory goes you will gain some hard and fast cost
benefits to add to your operational benefits, in the form of power savings. It’s more than
likely that theory is true too. Just don’t expect them overnight. Power savings come in long
cycles.
Systems resilience and disaster recovery is another one of the big wins from a virtualized
architecture. It can take previously impractical DR solutions into a whole new era of
smooth operation. Given that the virtual machine has its own virtual disk file, a backup
can be run on the host physical machine of said file – the VHD or VMDK in Microsoft and
VMware parlance respectively.

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

In similar fashion, virtualizing multiple apps onto a highly available virtualized infrastructure
can more than help IT operations staff sleep safe at night – it can help the entire business
operate more efficiently from top to bottom. Imagine knowing the resource level for
100 servers on a single screen - or perhaps being just two or three clicks away from
conducting a full image or file level backup of an entire server.
The notion of pooling hardware resources and making horsepower available more flexibly
on demand, and then paring it back when demand decreases is a real possibility with a
virtualized architecture. Essentially, it’s just taking virtualization to the next level by spinning
up or closing down virtual machines and images very quickly. There are challenges with
achieving this, that’s for sure. But it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to deliver some of
these benefits to the business today.
Development flexibility can also be a quick win for an organization that plans its
virtualization project carefully. The ability to test software upgrades to production servers
by copying and testing in a separate virtual environment before doing the upgrade in the
production environment delivers huge advantages and peace of mind.
There are of course caveats to virtualization so don’t go rushing off thinking it’s the
promised land. Software vendors still have significant steps to take in their licensing
models, middleware vendors have arguably not met the virtualized worlds needs yet, and
a lot of the Hypervisor vendors have not reached the benchmarks in areas many would
have hoped – such as guaranteeing back up integrity, reinforcing security, etc. That’s
not to mention the more tangible issue of what happens if you have memory leaks on a
server with 25 applications running on it – do you shut down the entire thing to apply the
patches? What happens if applications from different vendors have problems and neither
will take responsibility because of the ‘other’ application on the virtualized server?
Of course, if you plan your virtualization projects correctly, you should in theory at be able
to avoid those pitfalls.

Planning Virtualization
Like all IT projects, planning is the core component. It’s the one thing that should, and
hopefully will, take the most time of all the project stages.
This is particularly true of virtualization which, with its immediately gratifying goal of
consolidation, can lead organizations into troubled waters. The temptation is to run
towards that quick win of improved server utilization and ignore the huge benefits that
can be gained with good planning and smaller steps. (An often quoted problem when
gunning for these short term goals is the subsequent effect on the storage infrastructure
for instance – where SAN requirements have been massively understated and the server
pool ends up in a quagmire of problems.)
This is ultimately the whole point of planning. It’s all about understanding the end goals
and taking the right steps to get there successfully. To put it in the context of virtualization,
what you’re trying to avoid is heading down the road towards managing your virtual
estate in the same unautomated way that you might manage your physical estate –
and get there only to find you’ve saved some floor space but created a mess. See Fig 3
for a demonstration of just some of the challenges you can face during a consolidation
program and the relative benefits you can gain.
So what do you do? You can start by making sure you ask yourself the right questions.
Questions such as, “Are your infrastructure or support operations ready for virtualization?”
or “What’s the business advantage of virtualization?” are red herrings. A more important

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

question is that age-old “What IT services are you trying to deliver?” coupled with “And
how can they best be delivered with virtualization as part of the mix?”
Virtualization has a number of strengths – ease of deployment and provisioning, for
example, workload flexibility and scalability, increased infrastructure resilience. But you
and your IT organization will have to decide which of these qualities are important and in
what proportion.
The architectural view that results from such a prioritization exercise is fundamental to
getting the best out of IT in general, and virtualization in particular. If your organization is
highly dependent on transactional applications, you will require a certain IT environment.
Meanwhile, if you are a development shop, your needs will be different.

Have you faced any of the following challenges with

your consolidation activities?
% 0 20 40 60 80

Overhead of maintaining/
patching servers

Shortage of physical
space to house equipment

Under-utilization of servers
Figure 3
Dealing with cooling and
heat dissipation There are some marked differences between those
Overall operational who have proliferation under control, and those who
efficiency (cost/resource) do not.
The cost of power/
electricity to driver servers Percentages relate to respondents rating the issue 4
Server application or 5 on the challenge intensity scale
provisioning process

Server monitoring
(performance, health, etc)

Availability of power/
electricity to drive servers

Those with ongoing or emerging proliferation issues

Those that have server proliferation under control

This leads us into the possible virtualization scenarios to consider because it could go a
multitude of ways.
The first scenario is that virtualization remains in what is - to all intents and purposes, a
niche. It could end up a very big niche – and indeed from a vendor perspective a very
lucrative one – but nonetheless one in which virtualized machines sit in their own area,
running their own workloads and applications.
The second scenario is that virtualization will be a slow and steady burn, evolving into
the mainstream rather than being any big bang. We’ve seen this happen for a number
of technologies which needed so many other pieces to be ready before they could be
fully adopted – business intelligence or iSCSI to name but two. Other pieces in the path
to server virtualization encompass management tools at one end, and appropriate
hardware and protocols at the other – for example, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and all that can
ride on it.
Otherwise, we might see an avalanche effect, in the same way that we saw with mobile

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

phones, email, or the Internet. These broad areas were slow starters, but very quickly
picked up when they went from a nice-to-have to an expectation. It’s not hard to
imagine the scenario where it is just expected that virtualization capabilities will exist, and
if/when this happens, it could be coupled with a certain sense of urgency.
The third, and arguably end game scenario, is that everything is virtualized, management
and governance layers improve substantially and we finally achieve the ‘dynamic IT
environments, that so many have heralded, for so long.
From this perspective, our dynamic IT environments might end up looking like clouds. After
all, cloud infrastructures are dynamic virtualized environments, in essence. Once we’ve all
got one of these, matching or at least being compatible with external service providers’
infrastructures, we can take advantage of everything we’ll ever need in terms of raw
processing power, application development platforms, and all the software we ever used
in the ‘other’ scenarios.
These scenarios are not exclusive to larger organizations either. For smaller companies
perhaps the greater need is to cast virtualization into the environment, such that the more
standardized applications and packages can be run on a smaller, easier to manage
footprint.
For companies of all sizes however, whichever way the virtualization journey takes us, it will
require us to take into account what is already there. For some, ‘legacy’ IT may be a ball
and chain, for others it just works, and there is no reason to disrupt it. Taking existing IT into
account requires virtualization to be inserted very carefully as a layer.

Fig. Sources
All charts (1) (2) are derived from data gathered via an online survey of 301 IT professionals from
the UK, USA, and other geographies in November 2009

An Enterprise Virtualization Primer

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An Enterprise Virtualization Primer