VIRTUALISATION

Despite its six syllables, virtualisation is a straight forward concept. It can enable your organisation to get more value not only from computer and storage hardware but also from the labor required to keep your systems up and running.

Virtualisation is an approach to pooling and sharing IT resources so the supply of resources - processing power, storage, networking and so on - can flexibly

and automatically meet fluctuating business demand.

Virtualisation can improve the quality of your IT services, enabling more consistency and predictability of operational availability.

What's all the fuss about?

Today, most of the IT infrastructure supporting an enterprise is provisioned and managed one machine at a time. PCs are typically dedicated to a single user; servers are typically dedicated to a single application.

When it comes to storage, the situation is similar. Most enterprise data is used by single applications, or written to storage in proprietary formats. Thus, an application-specific focus often permeates the way storage is attached, configured and provisioned.

This physical approach to isolating applications has the advantages of enabling peak-load processing capability and reducing potential confusion in systems management. But these advantages come at a price that can be measured in terms of cost of available capacity, flexibility and quality of service.

Absent virtualisation, there is no way to immediately take advantage of the excess capacity sitting idle. New capacity must be manually configured, tested and brought on-line, typically a matter of hours or days or longer if new capacity must be procured.

It is also illuminating to consider this situation from the perspective of human resources. Each server requires management from a systems administrator. Typically,the greater the number of physical machines in a data center, the more costly it will be to manage. And there will be more things that can potentially go awry.

Managers of large data centers may find themselves frustrated that they are not as fast as they want to be in responding to needed changes. There may be moreroom than is desirable for errors and omissions in manual processes?all with increased risk of unplanned downtime.

Research from IDC estimates that management and administrative expenditures in data centers around the world are growing more than three times as fast as expenditures on hardware.

Virtualisation addresses both components of cost because it provides the basis for significant automation of management functions in addition to improving hardware utilisation, virtualisation can help stretch personnel resources and improve their effectiveness.

In addition to reducing costs, virtualisation distributes computing power with benefits analogous to those delivered by the grid to the distribution of electrical

power. The electrical grid flows power flexibly where it's needed, when it's needed. It prevents brown-outs and interruptions of availability. Virtualisation can deliver

these power distribution benefits to the data center.

Where to get started technically

The business benefits of virtualisation are compelling. And there are situations that lend themselves to particularly easy adoption.

For example, scheduled IT infrastructure refresh projects are a perfect opportunity to use virtualisation to reduce the costs of server acquisition, floor space and labour. This is also an excellent time to think about storage consolidation into a storage area network (SAN) or other network storage deployment.

IT consolidation projects are also excellent opportunities to introduce virtualisation. After all, once you have made the decision to modernise your infrastructure, you have the project team and the funding in place. You are then ideally positioned to take advantage of virtualisation and make your investment go further and improve your ability to respond to business changes. For example, you could start by consolidating the work of many older servers into a smaller number of servers that are partitioned into virtual servers.

If your company is moving toward a shared services approach to delivering business applications and/or a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to developing and integrating applications, infrastructure flexibility is a mandatory requirement. To achieve the promised financial benefits of sharing and reuse without losing control of the desired service levels, shared service utilities and SOA absolutely require virtualisation to handle changes and spikes in demand.

Finally, you can also begin experimenting with virtualisation simply to gain more value from your existing hardware investment.

How to get started organisationally

While the business benefits of virtualisation are undeniable, some companies have found that it is more difficult than they expected to catalyse the organisation into action.

First, moving to pooled and shared equipment in the data center requires just that?sharing! Sharing means that a line of business, a department or an application team no longer has sole control over its own dedicated infrastructure.

In a virtualised world, the physical server is shared and the dedicated server exists in essence or effect, though not in actual fact. The new breed of virtualization software, such as HP Virtual Server Environment or VMware, creates a virtual server on a just-in-time basis.

Business managers, and the IT staff that supports them, may initially be skeptical of the shared infrastructure. They want to see virtualisation proven before they

entrust business-critical applications to a new environment. Their concerns are practical in nature:

• How can our complicated environment be made simpler to operate?
• How will a virtualised system actually perform when two or more business groups or applications are experiencing peak-load requirements at the same time?
• What new skills will be required?
• Will the old approaches to troubleshooting work? Will new approaches be adequate?
• Will we be able to maintain our security and compliance practices? If not, can we adjust them to be compatible with a virtualized environment?

These questions must be answered before the organisation can move forward.

Even when the technology is tested sufficiently to be deemed trustworthy, established metrics may get in the way. Some companies, for example, measure labour productivity in terms of the number of servers managed by each system administrator. Moving to a virtualized world reduces the number of physical servers that must be managed by each administrator. So administrators appear (erroneously) to be less productive when they preside over a virtualised infrastructure.

Note: HP sees virtualisation as a key enabler of the transformation to an Adaptive Infrastructure to deliver on the next-generation data center trend. This article was contributed by HP.

? 39.3%

?Better? 20.