Virtualization

Organisations are continually looking to reduce operating costs, while increasing service levels, improving return on investment, and building a competitive edge. Virtualisation is an essential part of this strategy and is a proven technology for delivering multiple server environments on a single platform. The benefits are transparent, reducing operational costs, reducing total cost of ownership, reducing IT complexity, improving manageability, increasing disaster recovery and high availability capabilities.

Virtualization can transform your Organisation

Organisations have managed their business systems using the single operating system and single application model for many years. Prior to virtualisation this would involve the management of multiple physical servers that would be vastly underutilised, providing poor return on investment in hardware assets. Server Virtualisation allows organisations to consolidate operating environments, sharing the resources of the single host server across multiple environments and reducing an organisation’s infrastructure complexity while simultaneously reducing investment in physical hardware and the associated energy costs of running these platforms.

Virtual Infrastructure

Before moving from a physical to a virtual infrastructure there are a number of considerations and preparations that need to be made, and it’s important that all the pieces are in place before a single server is moved. Ensuring that you have a clear idea of the process and final boundaries of the project, as well as having the underlying infrastructure prepared will make the process smoother and quicker, and will greatly improve the quality of the finished product.

Initially a series of business decisions need to be made to determine what is to be gained from implementing a virtual infrastructure. What are the final benefits that need to be seen? What are the deliverables? Secondly these requirements need to be weighed up against the available funds for the project to determine a final budget. These considerations will determine the features and licenses required as well as the physical platform such as storage method and server arrangement.

Following that, a period of capacity planning and performance monitoring should follow to determine the system overheads for each server, both under standard and load conditions. This provides the data required to determine which servers should be virtualised and what resources they will require in a virtual environment. It also provides information as to whether current physical machines can be utilised and how their resources should be distributed, or if new and more powerful servers should be purchased for the sole purpose of being a virtual host. Not all servers suite virtualisation and so this process will also give some direction to whether the final environment will be completely virtual or a hybrid.

Prepare the physical environment as completely as possible before virtualizing. Ensure that the network is capable and is configured correctly, especially if using iSCSI storage, and ensure that adequate bandwidth from the servers and storage is present.

The final process of migrating physical to virtual servers should be done by starting small! Choose one or two low importance servers to convert and let them run for a while before planning and executing the others. P2V tools can be a convenient and trouble free way of migrating servers, but the migration process is usually a good time to rebuild server roles from the ground up ensuring where possible that installations are clean and any issues inherent in the physical server are eliminated.