A Contributed Article by Mike Thompson, SolarWinds’ director of business
strategy for virtualization and storage
It seems that the message to the millions of virtualization
users is that if you are not either working in a cloud environment or moving to
a cloud environment, you are behind or you have yet to be enlightened.
Vendors, press and analysts publish maturity curves that
often show the progression through which IT professionals should be moving to
achieve cloud enlightenment. Often, the typical virtualization user would be in
the “immature” portion of these maturity curves with a long road ahead of them before
they get to cloud “nirvana”.
The Road to the Responsible Cloud by Dennis Drogseth,
EMA. February 2011 EMA Analyst's Corner
Surprisingly, however, businesses don't seem to be following
that line of thinking with their wallets. Forrester's Private Cloud Market Overview report shows that while many people are
thinking about the cloud, only six percent of those surveyed had implemented a
private cloud. The problem with moving everything to the cloud is that not all
workloads are applicable to the cloud. Workloads that are static or low volume
and are difficult to standardize and automate typically don't provide enough
return on investment to justify a private cloud. This, combined with difficulty
in changing human processes, risks, business disruption, and the expense of
moving to a cloud infrastructure, doesn't always make sense.
The Cloud Isn't Right
for All Environments
There are a number of reasons why many virtual environments
may not be appropriate candidates for the cloud:
-
Virtualization environments that have business
processes cannot readily be standardized due to high variability in the
business requirements.
-
Static workloads, especially those that are
highly optimized for performance, are not good candidates for moving to a
highly dynamic cloud environment. Many times, these types of systems still run portions
of the environment on physical systems for optimal performance.
-
Total cost of standardizing and automating,
including the effort and time to change technology, IT, and business processes,
can be higher than the return on investment (ROI).
-
SLAs covering business loss are not available in
many public clouds or are more difficult to provide in a private cloud
environment. This fosters the viewpoint that virtual-to-cloud migration is
accompanied by increased risk and uncertainty.
-
Migration to the cloud calls for changing the
monitoring and management system on the virtualization environment to suit the cloud
environment. Cost savings with the new management system may not be as high and
immediately realizable as before.
-
Integration and data migration challenges may
apply when different types of business processes are being standardized and
automated into one cloud platform.
Having factored in all these challenges in the practical
reality of the situation, one can ask, "Does that mean the status quo of
virtualization is something to be put up with rather than moving to the cloud?"
Optimizing a Virtual Environment
Even if the cloud is not the right answer for many current
virtual environments, there is still the opportunity for substantial cost and
productivity gains by optimizing the existing virtual environment. There can be
huge gains by reducing cost, streamlining low-value labor tasks, optimizing
hardware utilization, and increasing business response time and flexibility of
the existing virtual environment - many of the same value propositions that are
promised from the cloud.
Some of the areas to consider when looking at how to
optimize an existing virtual environment include:
-
Server hardware
- Most environments have not fully optimized server resources including CPU,
memory, disk and I/O. The first step is typically to improve the visibility
into current usage patterns and conditions to identify capacity trends that
allow users to "right-size" their VMs. Monitoring
virtual machine performance also allows the user to increase the system
resource utilization safely knowing that they can identify performance issues
or capacity trends before they affect performance.
-
Storage
- The interactions between storage and the compute environment can have an
impact on performance. Coordinated management of both compute and storage
systems in a virtual environment can improve utilization, prevent over-provisioning,
and prevent SAN
performance bottlenecks.
-
Control
VM Sprawl - VM Sprawl can have a substantial impact on storage costs. Cost
savings can be multiplied if zombie VMs or other low-value VMs take up storage
that is also being backed up or is part of a disaster recovery/failover site.
-
Software
- Not all software licenses are optimized for a virtual environment including
the cost of the virtual environment itself. Should you load up your servers or
distribute your Windows VMs evenly? Is your vSphere license optimized? Additionally,
with recent (and anticipated) improvements in Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, a
strategy of using VMware® for production and Hyper-V for lower value workloads may
make sense for some environments.
-
Labor
- How many IT shops have a list of optimization projects that they can't get to
because they spend the majority of their time "fighting fires?" Gaining better
visibility into the virtual environment can help transform the results of hard
work from "treading water" to the ability to drive towards new business goals.
-
Alignment
with business goals - Improved visibility and capacity planning for the
virtual environment are critical to ensuring that the organization is able to
respond with speed and agility to changing business demands.
Finding the Right Balance
While the cloud clearly has a valuable place in the IT
ecosystem, it should not be the objective for all virtual environments. The
cloud isn't the right fit for many types of workloads. A well-planned,
optimized and managed virtualization environment can reap many of the same
benefits promised by the cloud.
It may be
smart to think about utilizing a colocation center for data storage. As one may
suspect, these centers are responsible for safely holding large amounts of data.
These centers are located in various areas of the country and the hardware is
maintained and cooled with utmost care by the employees. A small to moderate
sized business can see numerous benefits from switching to colocation. It
ensures that data will not be erased, nor will it be stolen. Cloud colocation is
a state of the art method of storage, and it gives business owners one less
thing to worry about.
A virtual environment can be optimized to achieve strong
business and IT benefits. A key to driving these benefits is gaining better
visibility into the entire virtual environment. Managing performance, proactive
capacity planning, reducing VM Sprawl and getting a unified view of both
storage and virtualization can drive significant financial and productivity
gains.
The sky isn't cloudy everywhere - optimized virtualization is
likely to remain a dominant component of the IT landscape for a long time to
come.
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About the Author
Mike Thompson is
Director of Business Strategy for Virtualization and Storage at SolarWinds, a
leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management
software. Thompson has a background in virtualization, cloud management,
and systems management strategy and product management.
Also, be sure to check out Choosing and Managing your Hypervisor Solution.