How to Virtualize

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By AT&T

Abstract:

Virtualization projects are under consideration or already in progress at many organizations looking to decrease their capital and real estate expenses and to launch energy-conservation initiatives. Through the use of special virtualization products and services, data center managers can apportion computing hardware resources to operating systems and applications on a time-sharing basis. In doing so, they can significantly boost the utilization and efficiency of servers, network equipment and storage devices. Such projects reduce the overall number of physical devices needed, the floor and rack space needed to house them and physical equipment management requirements.

Virtualization, then, holds a number of potential capital and operational cost-saving benefits. But it raises a few questions, too. For example, a mature virtual infrastructure will cross many traditionally separate internal groups of employees, such as those responsible for servers, networks, storage and security. So a virtualization project is likely to have an impact on organizational structure and responsibilities. Therefore, getting executive commitment and support, particularly from chief financial executives able to see the big-picture savings potential of going virtual, is critical to organization-wide buy-in and cooperation.

There are basic technical and logistical questions to consider when considering a virtualization plan:

• How do you calculate the appropriate ratio to use when consolidating physical servers and other devices into software-based virtual machines (VMs)?
• What is the impact of VMs on current disaster recovery and high-availability plans?
• Do security requirements shift in a virtual environment?
• How might software licensing/pricing models, power requirements and patch management processes need to change?

Preparing a well-documented business case based on an assessment of the current environment will help answer some of these questions. In your assessment and business case, you’ll need to calculate the physical host metrics needed – such as processor type and speed; RAM amount and utilization; network interface speeds and quantities; disk resources and other metrics.

The business case should also delineate the problems you expect virtualization to solve. For example, are you currently experiencing low utilization rates on servers while growing numbers of servers are becoming unwieldy to house and manage? Going through the exercise of calculating the hard benefits will help you answer some of these questions and drive acceptance and adoption of the virtualization project throughout the organization.