Say goodbye to underutilized hardware platforms, server sprawl and spiraling IT costs. New virtualization technologies allow companies to deploy a few highly scalable, highly reliable, enterprise-class servers to do the same work that used to require a roomful of servers, each running an individual application and sitting idle whenever the application wasn't at work. Virtualization promises to keep expensive hardware busy running whatever application needs resources at any given time - which means less hardware to buy, provision and maintain.

Server consolidation is just the beginning. Today's virtualization technologies enable a wide range of usage scenarios and benefits. However, as virtualization adoption grows, questions still remain. In fact, data center managers and CIOs are finding that virtualization makes it more difficult to confidently manage day-to-day data center tasks, like scheduling jobs, automating load balancing and accurately tracking where work is done.

To make the most of virtualization, organizations must employ the next breed of systems management tools that include desktop-to-data center management automation. Deploying data center management products with virtualization technology is the only way to save money and increase data center efficiency. These solutions deliver automated, policy-based management for physical and virtual data center environments, giving organizations the tools they need to manage the complexity of their IT infrastructure.

AN OLD IDEA MADE BETTER - A LOT BETTER

Virtualization is not a new concept. Techniques were commonly used throughout the 1960s and 1970s to boost performance for shared mainframe systems; however, as microprocessors became ever more powerful and affordable in the 1980s and 1990s, PC servers replaced mainframe and minicomputer systems. The virtualization concept was forgotten as it became practical and affordable to simply deploy a new server whenever IT wanted to launch a new application or boost the performance of an existing one.

Moreover, as x86-based servers became more affordable and ubiquitous, departments and workgroups became accustomed to "owning" their own servers. When a department needed a new application deployed, they would simply request an additional server and IT managers would oblige. Adding servers became the easy way to manage growth and change, and even today this is still the default choice for many IT managers. But the result for many companies has been an alarming increase in server sprawl, which became progressively worse throughout the 1990s right up to the present day. As a result, many enterprise servers are utilized at an appallingly low rate - as little as 15 percent capacity - even while data centers are stuffed to the rafters with power-hungry servers. The cost to maintain these large data centers has continued to increase, consuming resources at every level: financial, operational and administrative.

As the costs continue to rise for housing, powering, cooling and maintaining all these servers, many enterprises today are looking to transition to a usage-oriented computing model-that is, an environment where computing resources can be dynamically reassigned to accommodate changing demands. This model requires a holistic approach to infrastructure, with coordinated technologies in both silicon and software that facilitate a dynamic match of resource supply with resource demand.

Virtualization is the keystone in this service-oriented dynamic computing model. Unlike the performance gains of first-generation virtualization technologies on mainframes that were confined to one "box", today's existing and emerging server virtualization technologies promise to bring unprecedented flexibility to the enterprise data center, enabling new levels of cost-efficiency and responsiveness across heterogeneous unique environments. In short, what many have only hoped for and imagined - adaptive and responsive virtualization - is here today.

THE PROMISE OF VIRTUALIZATION

Few can deny the promises and benefits that virtualization brings to the data center. At a high level, virtualization provides flexibility and cost efficiency. It also lessens the burden corporations place on the environment. Analyst firm IDC estimates that the total power and cooling bill for servers in the U.S. costs a whopping $14 billion per year, and if the current trends persist, the bill is going to rise to $50 billion by the end of the decade. The energy needed to cool and fuel data centers is enormous. Virtualization requires less space in the data center, and thus less electricity and cooling, which is better for the environment.

For the data center managers, business continuity is key. Virtualization can make their jobs easier by providing:
Rapid application validation and deployment
Application portability
Dynamic load balancing
Failover with minimal service interruption
Extended life for legacy operating systems and hardware
Simplified physical infrastructure in a heterogeneous software environment

New virtualization technologies are rapidly emerging, giving rise to new industry organizations, like The Green Grid, which are committed to improving energy efficiency in the data center. Clean virtualization strategies, backed by technology consortiums, create new usage models that can transform the entire IT enterprise. Or, to put it more appropriately, virtualize the entire enterprise.

DATA CENTER AUTOMATION IS THE MISSING LINK

Virtualization is here and the benefits are already proving to be fruitful. However, that's only half the story. If organizations are excited by virtualization's promises (and it's hard not to be), decision-makers may find it difficult to see an additional, larger need: data center automation tools.

Imagine assembling the world's best orchestra - you scour every continent for the best violinists and trumpet players, the most skilled drummers and harpists. But you fail to hire a conductor - let alone an experienced, advanced conductor. All the musicians gather to play what is expected to be the best Handel's Messiah ever played. However, without a conductor, everyone is playing at once, the tempo is off, and no one knows when to begin the next movement - hardly worth the time and effort to develop the orchestra.

Without data center automation tools, the same holds true for virtualization. It also brings a new set of management challenges that must be considered. According to Yankee Analyst George Hamilton, "You can very quickly deploy virtual machines into an environment, and it's very easy to get virtual-machine sprawl. You can end up with capacity issues and resource allocation issues, so a lot of the initial challenges are around how to optimize the physical infrastructure for all the virtual machines."

For example, the introduction of virtual machine operating system "images" as a first-class IT asset necessitates operating system (OS) image lifecycle management - for instantiation, usage and retirement. Additionally, cloning new OS images from templates versus creating and deploying new images is also required. Cloning is optimal for transient workloads, compared to OS images that are version controlled as part of a change-control strategy. OS images must be managed, leaving IT to ask key questions: "How do I control who defines and creates an OS image?", "What is the process for rolling out to production?" and "How do I manage change for virtual machines?"

A second challenge is that once multiple virtual machines have been deployed to a physical server, multiple applications and business systems are critically affected in the event of a server failure. It is no longer enough to just replace a downed server and suffer a short application outage. Should a physical server fail, there must be an automatic, rapid deployment of services in order to achieve business continuity.

To combat these challenges, a single automated solution can be used to manage virtual machines, identities, storage and systems in a coordinated and intelligent way according to workload requirements, hardware health and business policies.

According to Hamilton, innovation will be in the form of orchestration and today's network tools just won't cut it. "To be able to manually reallocate resources, that is just not feasible and it goes against the whole value of virtualization. You would end up having to provision a bunch of overhead so that you could move the VMs around successfully without interrupting anything. And that defeats the whole purpose of trying to optimize the infrastructure."

A lack of management tools is just bad business. Today, organizations have to define "blackout" periods, the windows of time that IT "owns" in order to patch or update systems to better secure them or to support new application features. These blackout periods mean that some or all of the business must come to a halt. In our global economy, where business runs 24x7, this may cost a company millions in revenue. The business needs a way to assign priority between the update and the needs of the business. The ability to dynamically allocate resources through pre-emption, or "starving", can offer the business the best case for maintaining the balance between business process and systems maintenance.

Taking it a step further, cross-platform solutions based on policies that the company sets, are interoperable with the systems already in their IT environment, and allow the manager to orchestrate the management of both virtual and physical environments are crucial. Policy-driven solutions ensure security and compliance, eliminate administrator effort and enable total control over the IT environment from the desktop to the data center.

To date, most virtualization in the data center has been focused on creating a "sandbox" for application development, testing and deployment. However, some companies are beginning to take virtualization to the next level by repurposing machines to handle different workloads and consolidating hardware resources. This increased adoption and usage of virtualization will require cross-platform management tools built on open standards.

Data center managers are looking for management solutions that are built using open standards which give them the greatest flexibility and control. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) are two standards bodies that are driving the adoption of these foundational standards, including the Common Information Model (CIM), Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) and Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMIS).

Standards are just the beginning. To turn virtualization into a powerful, flexible platform, the industry will need to create tools for tying management of physical and virtual machines together. New, open virtualization formats will make it easier to migrate workloads across virtual machines, including Xen, with minimal modification. Other technology advances make it possible to repurpose virtual machines and migrate workloads on the fly, as well as in an integrated management model for both physical and virtual machines. The objective is to create an agile, policy-based environment — one that automates and orchestrates management of identities, systems, storage and virtual machines.

Virtualization and its promises of reducing sever sprawl, heating and cooling costs and power consumption are possible, but they cannot be attained without effective management in place. With orchestrated management tools that automate critical data center processes, like dynamic load-balancing, workload scheduling, disaster recovery and automatic failover, organizations can make the virtualization dream a reality.