28 September 2008

Owen McKee, UK and Ireland country manager for Avocent, describes how the financial industry should be at the forefront of virtualisation implementation.

According to Gartner, financial services organisations account for 25.3 per cent of all server revenues worldwide. It is therefore no surprise that the sector is leading the field when it comes to looking for new ways to get the most out of technology. This drive to optimise IT spending, coupled with the recent economic downturn, has led many firms to look to virtualisation to cut costs.

Virtual servers offer attractive benefits – from immediate deployment and more dynamic allocation of server capacity to enabling more mileage from hardware investments by running multiple virtual servers on a single physical machine. Financial firms are deploying virtual servers in rapidly increasing quantities – in 2007, IDC predicted that virtual server deployments will rise 40.6 per cent annually through 2010.

In the increasingly mixed physical-virtual environment this creates, how do you even begin to tackle management? The traditional divide-and-conquer method with separate tools and staff for the physical and virtual worlds has IT running two separate data centres, which is inefficient and can create inconsistencies. The key to killing the complexity is to develop a consolidated management strategy.

IT departments are under constant pressure to do more with less. They are being asked to roll out more applications, support more users, deliver higher levels of service and handle more intense processing workloads – with budgets that rarely increase proportionally to these escalating demands. To cope with this pressure, organisations are exploring virtualisation in varying degrees.

Some are experimenting with virtualisation solutions in the lab, while others have begun extensive virtual server rollouts. But even the most enthusiastic adopters are only partially applying virtualisation – no one is implementing an entirely virtual environment.

Virtual server technology can help financial firms to significantly improve the economics of data centre infrastructure

Owen McKee, Avocent Virtual server technology can help financial firms to significantly improve the economics of data centre infrastructure. However, it also introduces new complexities and challenges in managing that infrastructure, as virtual servers must be managed in conjunction with physical ones. These challenges significantly impact the way IT organisations must evolve their data centre management in the face of hybrid physical-virtual environments.

For many applications – especially high input/output ones like e-mail – virtualisation is neither practical nor advisable. Therefore, no data centre can, or will, ever be fully virtualised. Investments in physical servers are significant and IT departments won’t scrap those investments anytime soon. IT departments are still figuring out how and when to implement virtualisation, and adoption rates can depend on many non-technical factors such as competition for IT budget and whether the department can deliver the appropriate support. Challenges that arise from the nature of virtual server technology itself include the following.

Giving IT staff appropriate privileges – It can already be somewhat complicated to give IT staff access and appropriate privileges for specific physical servers. When multiple virtual servers are running on individual physical machines, the administration of these rights becomes even more complex.

Maintaining management assignments as virtual servers move from one physical machine to another – To avoid giving systems administrators and application specialists inappropriate control over the data centre’s virtual infrastructure, IT departments use a manual approach for the distribution of IP addresses and/or management URLs to the specific virtual machines for which each IT employee is responsible.

Accessing multiple virtual servers – At this time, VMware doesn’t enable IT staff to unify their views of multiple virtual servers residing on different physical machines if the ESX Service consoles of those machines are connected to different VirtualCentres.

Protecting many virtual servers from component failure – With physical servers, there is a one-to-one relationship between component failure and application outage. When multiple applications are running on that same server, the stakes go up. IT organisations implementing virtualisation must be sensitive about the vulnerabilities created by multiplexing large numbers of virtual servers onto a single physical machine – and must be sure they have the out-of-band access to those physical machines necessary to address BIOS and hardware-level issues.

The above are some of the initial management challenges that early adopters of VMware and other virtualisation solutions are discovering as they roll out virtual servers in their data centres. There are likely to be others. The point is that the emerging virtualised data centre is even more complex to manage than conventional environments.

It is difficult to fully understand how virtualisation will impact management operations before you implement them, but you can be prepared to tackle any problems by looking for a solution that delivers integrated management functionality across both physical and virtual server platforms, such as:
• Access to virtual and physical servers through a single interface
• Access to virtual servers distributed across multiple VMware VirtualCentres through a single interface
• Consolidated events and alerts from both physical and virtual servers
• Granular control access rights to virtual and physical servers in a common manner
• Management assignments for virtual servers even as they are moved from one physical machine to another
• Granular audit management operations that can be performed on both virtual and physical servers.

Ultimately, virtual servers offer attractive benefits, encouraging enterprises increasingly to deploy them. But new technologies can lead to headaches if not appropriately managed, so it’s essential to develop a strategy to simultaneously tackle both physical and virtual server management?

This article first appeared in the 2008 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

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