The significance of virtualisation has enabled companies to work more effectively, while also saving money.
There is some danger that the general business audience may grow bored with its relentless buzz, but there is no doubt that virtualisation is one of the most significant and far-reaching technical shifts in information and communications technology (ICT) in recent years. Like most developments of any significance in the rapidly changing and competitive ICT market, there is a flood of hype to be waded through to grasp the real and practical advantages of virtualisation.
It has been a concept in computer architecture since the mainframe. It began as an architecture in the data storage field that offered many technical advantages and then rapidly moved on to servers. Now, it has become something akin to a new universal strategy, with great promise for all enterprise computing needs across the spectrum.
In essence, virtualisation means that a set of physical computing elements are pooled as a single logical resource. The idea is that, if you make all of the separate devices effectively invisible below a control layer, then those resources can be managed as if everything were one common pool.
Server consolidation has been a major driver of virtualisation. Server processing utilisation has typically been of the order of 5-15 per cent but virtualisation can push that up to 60-80 per cent. Various vendors claim different figures but there seems to be industry consensus that virtualisation can reduce capital expenditure by perhaps 40 per cent, and operational costs by a whopping 50-70 per cent. With returns like these, a few percentage points either way are not worth arguing about.
Virtualisation outside of the mainframe world began seriously with the advent of VMware in 1998. VMware is now part of EMC and the storage company is a natural partner, since VMware is server-neutral and has alliances with HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Sun and others.
“After almost a decade, we see virtualisation in a third and mature stage of development,” said Matt Piercy, VMware EMEA director of alliances. “The first stage was about partitioning individual servers. Then we started to see centralised management of multiple servers, with many more instances of virtual machines and load balancing to utilise capacity more efficiently.”
At this stage, he said, virtualisation is effectively a mature infrastructure strategy that virtualises servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating tems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.
“It creates one pool of computing resources and can be the infrastructure of an SME or a giant multinational enterprise. It is automated and self-optimising, while failure protection allows seamless failover from one tem to another and means rigorous SLAs can be offered to specific applications and lines of business,” said Piercy.
But that, of course, describes the underlying principle of ‘cloud computing’ which means, as Piercy pointed out, that “an organisation can literally make its entire data and applications infrastructure available anywhere in the world using VMware Cloud'‘. He said that this would become rapidly more important in a market where energy and even electricity supply constraints mean that adding data centre resources can be difficult.
Although the Irish market is well-informed, actual adoption of virtualisation is still at an early stage, according to Justin Owens, managing director of Commtech, the VMware distributor in Ireland. He is happy to accept that the principal drivers are the severely practical ones like cost reduction.
“Virtualisation promises almost a new generation of computing, with more power and flexibility. But the selling points are consolidation of server and storage resources, the central IT resources that are common to all organisations, and the ease of business recovery in the event of a disaster,” he said.
But as a virtualisation expert, Owens was also concerned that the spread of virtualisation could pose security risks if not expertly handled. “People can be putting in new virtual machines [VM] so fast that the traditional disciplines of security are difficult to keep up.
“You can have perhaps dozens of virtual servers within one physical blade server and a security threat that is passed from one VM to another. But normal security, such as intrusion prevention or detection, does not necessarily see that data traffic within a single physical box,” he said.
On the other hand, he said that virtualisation could assist the experts in deploying security because corporate policies and security templates could be neatly incorporated in a standard VM model for the organisation.
“Another development is that anti-intrusion software can itself be installed as a standalone, locked-down VM. It is now a logical appliance, rather than a box.”
In general, virtualisation is a mature set of technologies, said Sandra Dunne, general manager of Appliance Technology, which works with NetApp and VMware. “However, some elements are proven over a longer period - servers and data storage are clearly the main areas in that context. Within any enterprise, IT needs to be able to justify the spends that are being made and, if virtualisation helps us to do that, then a business case is readily made,” she said.
“Traditionally, companies were getting potentially about 40 per cent utilisation of their hardware. With virtualisation, you can get up to 80 per cent utilisation on your servers. That is really significant savings for any business and actually driving the market for new servers.
“If you then look at your storage environment, NetApp provides technology that has been focusing on bangs for bucks by strengthening an already strong storage platform to provide multiple ways to reducing your data storage requirements, without adding any risks to that data.
“Companies have been driven to making policy decisions on their data storage because of budget requirements. This doesn't always have to be the case. With virtualisation, cloning and de-duplication, we reckon to provide clients with over 50 per cent savings in data storage.”
Virtualisation is not just about consolidation and Dunne said that more and more organisations were looking at the other major gains and opportunities presented by virtualisation strategies.
“Sheer flexibility can provide significant business benefits. For example, virtualisation and replication can lead to very effective and speedy disaster recovery solutions,” she said.
“The flip side of that same coin, as it were, is that new resources from an additional server to a new application, or even a complete branch tems rollout, can be delivered much faster because so many of the elements are virtual.”
Gerry Swan, the recently appointed territory manager of specialist consultancy Virtualize IT, said that there was a growing demand on the IT sector to be more imaginative in its attempts to reduce costs and improve upon efficiency of tems. These demands, combined with our current economic climate, have given way to a stronger case for virtualisation of server and desktop infrastructure.
“Virtualisation of the IT estate is one of the only methods of reducing costs without venturing into slash and burn, knee-jerk reactions. The technology has given IT managers a serious tool to achieve the majority of their goals, whether they be cost-saving, improved security or tem efficiency,” he said. Swan said that there was a growing awareness of the capability enhancements that virtualisation could bring.
“The level of in-depth knowledge by IT managers was now coupled with a quite firm understanding of the technology by financial and operational managers,” he said. “This has allowed Irish companies to surge ahead and the question now for most companies is not if, but when will we implement a virtual environment.”
Referring to recent security breaches and data losses, Swan said: “With the development of desktop and remote user virtualisation, there is simply no need for data to be stored on the physical laptop.
“Companies and state bodies are reacting to this development and implementing change, and the more forward-thinking clients have already begun this process. The current security risk could effectively disappear, and the loss or theft of a laptop will merely mean replacing an inexpensive piece of kit.”
While ‘consolidation' is the handy shorthand for what a virtualisation strategy can bring to the enterprise, it can too easily be equated simply with cost savings, according to Roger Baskerville, Citrix Xen regional director for server virtualisation.
“There are dozens of very practical problems and challenges for many organisations. They are typically running out of data centre space, for example, since most of them are in fact computer rooms in converted office spaces. Energy can be a problem, not so much because of costs as of supply availability and reliability, especially when you have high seasonal cooling costs,” he said.
So, if ten servers are reduced to two, with five VM instances on each, it actually makes a very significant contribution to that space and energy dilemma. “But it is the sheer corporate flexibility that follows that delivers the more strategic business benefits. Your data and workloads are all virtual, so they can be created, moved, replicated, backed up or d with a few expert clicks,” he said.
“You lock an operating tem to a specific piece of hardware and tie the application and its data to them. In the meantime, the world moves on apace and each of those elements is going out of date. So three years later you replace them all,” Baskerville said.
“Of course it doesn't make sense, which is why virtualisation is here to stay and is actually, by now, the default IT strategy. Servers from HP and Dell, for example, now come with virtualisation technology embedded and you just choose at boot time. ‘Just three minutes to Xen' would be our slogan.”
Francis O'Haire, technical director of consultancy firm Data Solutions, the leading Citrix partner in Ireland, said: “It was largely bigger organisations which were the early adopters.
“They were the first to encounter, for example, the problems of proliferating servers, crowded data centres and, latterly, spiral ling energy costs. But today, virtualisation can offer easy wins even for an SME with just half a dozen servers and it is not just the economics.”
An argument that always rings a bell is that virtualisation offers a higher level of availability and a relatively simple and economical business continuity solution, O'Haire said.
“In the event of a problem, failover from your production tem can be as speedy as a replacement server booting up. Yet that used to be an expensive option for smaller companies that needed high availability - a firm of solicitors, as opposed to a distribution company.
“In larger SMEs, at this stage anyway, the fleet of desktops is almost unmanaged and is nearly unmanageable,” O'Haire said.
“There is little central control or governance and even simple anti-malware security is a problem. Desktop virtualisation offers a way to give users the applications and data access they need with their own settings, but centrally hosted and controlled.
“The personal computer has served us well, but the pain hits when it is time to change. So centralised computing in a virtualised environment gives even the SME a more easily control led computing resource while individual users can have their desktops exactly as they want them.
“Who cares where the applications run or where the data is stored, other than IT and the responsible directors?”
In the thoroughly competitive server market, virtualisation is the name of the only game in town. In IBM, HP and Dell, a new server now ships with virtualisation built in. Bryan Hickson, System X and Blade Center manager for IBM Ireland, said that servers even ship with hypervisors on the main tem board. “You just choose a key stroke in the BIOS to use it as a virtualised or a traditional server.”
Market success for virtualisation is very straightforward, he said, because it simply offered more value than any alternative server or storage strategy.
“‘We can do more for less' is the mantra and it is a good enough business case in most organisations when IT talks to finance or purchasing,” Hickson said.
According to Hickson, the market in general was quite accustomed to server virtualisation, with IDC showing at least 72 per cent of organisations having some instance of virtualisation, if only in pilot projects. “Gartner also suggests that 5-7 per cent of all servers are virtualised at this stage, but we think that is actually quite a low figure.”
Like most of our interviewees, Hickson said that the most important benefits of virtualisation were in management and flexibility of IT resources, with total cost of ownership, naturally enough, also important.
“PC virtualisation is definitely the next wave. Using Citrix Xenserver, for example, the only difference in the user's desktop is the shutdown button. But it is actually server-based computing, with all of the management and secularity benefits of fully centralised resources.
“A nice terminal with f lat screen, delivering all of that PC desktop functionality, will use just a fraction of the energy and probably have a life of up to eight years,” said Hickson. “Compared to the acquisition, support, maintenance and energy costs of a PC, the choice is completely simple. Even with software licensing and other costs, the savings are going to be of the order of 50-60 per cent per user.”
Karl Jordan, enterprise storage manager of HP Ireland, said: “Al l we actually want from our computing is functionality. Where the data is held and what is running the applications are questions for the experts. Users and managers should not need to know or care. Perhaps, a lot of the time, they don't anyway.”
What virtualisation has brought is the ability to create a big, integrated pool of computing re sources. “Whether it is capacity, performance speed, availability or whatever, it can be delivered from that pooled resource as required.”
This had other IT management benefits, Jordan said, starting with the fact that virtualisation brought together multiple and usually heterogeneous sub-tems.
“They can even be geographically dispersed, which brings in the notions of utility computing, cloud computing and so on. Once again, all the user needs is the functionality and data access.”
According to Jordan, the main drivers are not just cost cutting but, first and foremost, that virtualisation simplifies complexity and enables great flexibility. The organisation can get more out of its ICT infrastructure investment. It can also, importantly, keep control of standardised desktops and data access permissions across its entire ICT environment.
But everyone keeps coming back to the fact that consolidation and cost savings are the key drivers: “For the last two years or so, we have been seeing 8:1 consolidation ratios being achieved by our customers,” said Bernard Roche, virtualisation practice manager with Del l Ireland. “Sometimes, people even in the IT sector can be to simplistic about it. In reality, any organisation's server resources are only going to be about 60-80 per cent virtualisable.
“But we live in interesting times, with hypervisors like Microsoft HyperV and VMware ESXi available for free with your new server. Physically, some servers come with SD [secure digital] card slots for the virtualisation software to control any number of VMs on the drives.”
That all means that even an SME could set up virtualised servers without technical consultants, while ongoing management is either automated or just as simple.
“Another factor not always recognised is that waiting until your servers are due for replacement anyway is not by any means the most economical solution. Very often, the decommissioned servers can offer a very cost-effective contribution to your disaster recovery plan,” Roche said.
Roche has also seen virtualisation drive serious reviews of data storage in companies. “Once everything is being managed logically, rather than by device, it is easier to see the value, for example, of a good de-duplication and data clean-up programme. So you are not backing up everything every night, but migrating old stuff to archive and replicating support from the large application vendors,” said Jason Boyle, professional services manager of PFH.
“In the Irish market, however, especially as we all experience tighter controls on budgets and spending, our customers see the move to a virtualised environment offering cost-cutting benefits.
“Initiatives that result in reduced power, cooling and operating costs are both green and appealing to the accountants,” Boyle said. “But there also a lot of advantages that are relevant to business today, such as reduced expert maintenance for fewer physical server numbers and increased productivity based on higher availability of tems.”
Although scepticism is tempting, Boyle said that green initiatives were of particular interest in larger organisations and the public sector. “Significant savings can combine with harmonisation of IT and facility management objectives. For example, where there is low usage out of hours, virtual servers can automatically be combined to fewer servers and ‘spare' servers powered off. Come morning, they are automatically powered on and the server load redistributed again.”
Ireland is traditionally a cautious IT market, according to Graeme Gordon, professional services manager of IT consultant and trainer SureSkills.” But in the current economic climate, everyone recognises it has never been as important to do more with less. Virtualisation can provide very tangible cost savings but also offers a quick return on investment in many respects.
“We are still behind here in adopting virtualisation. It is infrastructural and dramatic, so there has been a perceived risk. Organisations might also have seen it as something they do not actively need. That perception is changing rapidly,” Gordon said.
“As might be imagined, virtualisation works far better with newer gear. Modern multi-processor servers with lots of Ram are the ideal platform for server virtualisation, for example, with a typical configuration of two quad core processors and 32GB of Ram. That could be perceived by managements as excessive specification.”
In fact, SureSkills has seen a greater take-up of virtualisation by medium-sized enterprises. “They can see the potential and act decisively. Reducing servers from ten to two, for example, makes simple and immediate sense. If existing servers are more than about a year old, they are down to just two or three years of further useful life in any event. These are often the kind of high value-added enterprises like professional practices where the other benefits of virtualisation can be recognised, such as sheer flexibility and high availability of key tems,” Gordon said.
Microsoft was a late convert to virtualisation but is now one of the leading advocates, although it should also be pointed out that its Terminal Services application for server-based computing is coming into its own in a virtualised world.
“You can give your users their desktops with applications and access to their data with great flexibility, either through terminal services or a browser,” said Bill O'Brien, business group lead for servers in Microsoft Ireland.
“Our view and our vision is of choice and flexibility, services and software delivered as appropriate or as required. They could be local, server-based, online or in the cloud. To the user, what they need is just an icon on the desktop.”
Virtualisation is one of the key technologies underpinning this new generation of computing. The benefits to organisations look set to change some of the long-standing ICT ratios and perhaps perceptions in business, O'Brien said. “For a very long time, the IT ratio in spend and time and everything else in every organisation was about 60/40, with the bulk of the work demanded by ongoing maintenance and generally keeping the tems up.
“Now, we can see a situation where that 60/40 is reversed and the main thrust of ICT is towards change, new applications and developments, and projects. Virtualisation is the key enabler, because it means even infrastructure can be changed, moved or replaced very quickly.”
Networks are not something that most business people will associate with virtualisation, yet, according to John Stone, chief technology officer of Cisco Ireland.
“Virtualisation at the carrier level with V/Lans goes back over a decade. The main reason then, as it still is, was to help control capital expenditure. You did not need as many boxes.”
At the operational level, he said that the savings were not as great because you need people to manage tems, physical maintenance, energy and so on, while overheads are very often relatively fixed.
But the contribution of virtualisation to reducing both capex and opex costs continues, Stone said, citing the example of Cisco's latest high performance Catalyst Lan switch, which is, in fact, purely a software tem. “It sits in VMware's ESX hypervisor along with the other virtualised software elements.”
Instead of perhaps 20 servers and 20 cables connected to a Lan switch, there is only one physical network and everything else is virtual. “The functionality can go further and be automated, just as traditional network functions are. Say there's a big fault in the middle of the night and 20 VMs need to be moved to a different data centre. It can be simply automated or, for a technician, it would be a simple drag and operation on screen and it's done,” Stone said.
These are the smart new areas where network virtualisation is starting to cut down operating costs, as well as generating greater control, flexibility and efficiency.
