The dangers lurking in a virtual environment

Virtualization has firmly established itself as the hot topic of 2009. Its adoption in organizations of all sizes has rapidly accelerated this year as it has graduated from an exciting new technology to a must have solution.

“For all the benefits of virtualization, there are some dangers lying in a virtual environment and it is vital that organisations identify and eliminate these dangers before embarking on a virtualization project”

The benefits of the technology are unquestionable. It helps consolidate an IT infrastructure and control data volumes, eliminating management headaches, and by doing so it increases operational efficiency. Ultimately it has the power to cut costs from the bottom line. But what is virtualization? What are the hazards of a virtual environment, and how can these be addressed? How can you, as an organisation, plan for virtualization? The following article will investigate and address such questions.

What is virtualization and what are the benefits?

Virtualization technology enables a single physical computer to appear to function as multiple virtual computers. With virtualization, you can run multiple, concurrent operating systems on a single physical server; each of the operating systems runs as a self-contained computer. Benefits include:

• Many physical servers can be consolidated into fewer physical servers. Fewer physical servers result in a reduction in hardware costs, a reduction in server sprawl and, accordingly, a reduction in the amount of floor space required to accommodate servers.
• Fewer servers result in simplified management - backup and disaster recovery plans can become easier to create, manage and maintain, if implemented correctly.
• Consolidation results in reduced electricity consumption and reduced utility bills leading to a reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each server.
• Each virtual machine environment - the guest operating system and everything that runs on that virtual machine - is stored as a single file on the virtual machine. This virtual machine can be moved easily and quickly to a different physical server, enabling zero-downtime for upgrades and maintenance.

This list is far from exhaustive and many organisations will find that virtualization offers numerous other benefits that will help to increase agility, reduce costs, and reduce management complexity of the data contained within their systems.

Planning for virtualization

For all the benefits of virtualization, there are some dangers lying in a virtual environment and it is vital that organisations identify and eliminate these dangers before embarking on a virtualization project. In order for any virtualization project to be successful, and deliver the best possible return on investment (ROI), extensive planning is essential. Consideration should be given to:

Migration: The first technical stage in any virtualization project is migration. Companies must consider how they are going to migrate data from existing (physical) machines to new (virtual) ones. Remember that consolidation is not a one-way task. Servers that you consolidate today should be migrated back to physical servers later if the demands on the virtual machines change. Preparing for the future and recognizing that virtual-to-physical migrations are possible, and perhaps necessary, is an important aspect of planning.

Management: It is likely that you will be using technology from more than one virtualization vendor. Managing and migrating data across these multiple platforms can pose a problem in its own right. While virtualization can reduce management headaches, paradoxically it also creates new ones as your IT manager tries to figure out how to juggle data across different environments. Some technology enables you to manage across mixed environments from one central management console.

Backup and recovery: How will virtualization affect backup and disaster recovery processes?

As server virtualization becomes mainstream businesses are investing a lot of time researching the most suitable virtualization platform for their environment. Equally as important and sometimes overlooked, organisations also need to address how to best protect their data which is now held across both physical and virtual machines. Keep in mind that virtual servers are subject to the same variety of loss scenarios as their traditional physical counterparts (whether this be natural disasters, viruses or hard disk corruption) - as well as an array of additional ones that arise from the nature of the virtualization technology itself.

It is therefore critical that companies take their virtual backup and disaster recovery strategies seriously as well as determining what needs to be backed up, how often it needs to be backed up, and establishing the necessary windows in which to schedule backups without resource contention.

Conclusion

While the process of planning and deploying virtualization can be challenging, the benefits of migration can be significant. Organizations are now beginning to use virtualization technologies to better protect their most valuable asset: the data contained within their servers. Other benefits include driving down hardware and software licensing costs, reduced utility bills, simplifying and rationalising management processes, minimising expensive downtime, and improved security of computer systems.

As your company develops, your needs will change. Remember, the application that you virtualize today - such as a SQL database - might need to be moved back to a physical environment later on as the database grows and, for example, requires more CPU cycles. When selecting your best-of-breed tools for migrating to a virtual environment, make sure you select tools for moving back to a physical server or migrating to dissimilar hardware on a different virtual machine.

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