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Virtualisation

With increasing concerns over cost management, energy conservation and total cost of ownership, virtualisation technology almost seems too good to be true. Consolidation ratios can be as high as 15:1, meaning that 15 physical servers can be virtualised and migrated to a single virtual host with little or no downtime and no loss of performance.

		Increase Return on Investment (ROI) of server hardware
		Reduce the operational costs associated with managing and provisioning servers
		Improve IT’s ability to respond to business changes
		Increase uptime and performance of applications

Benefits include far greater flexibility and a wider array of Disaster recovery and backup options. These benefits lead directly to better performance and availability.

Virtualisation can also provide load balancing and clustering without recourse to expensive hardware or software solutions.

The primary reasons to adopt virtualisation are illustrated below:

Consolidation and Containment
This feature is the usual first point of call for adopters of virtualisation and brings the most easily understood benefits. Consolidation of existing server hardware onto a vastly reduced number of host servers is the first and most obvious benefit. This in turn provides an infrastructure that makes server containment easy to manage. It also allows for easy migration, cloning, deployment, copying and recovery of “Servers” from a simple set of files.

Disaster Recovery and High Availability
Virtual Infrastructure in the field of business continuity offers compelling advantages over traditional methods in addition to significant cost saving potential.

		Virtualisation can speed up recovery from site failure eliminating the risk of lengthy or unsuccessful recoveries.
		Service downtime related to server hardware failure or scheduled maintenance, upgrade or reconfiguration can be eliminated.
		Reduced complexity cuts administration costs related to planning and testing DR processes.

Multisite
Replicating critical servers to a second site onto physical hardware can be prohibitively expensive and complex, often requiring double the investment and maintenance. Using Virtualisation for DR enables complete systems, including virtual hardware, OS and applications to be consolidated onto a fewer number of physical server hosts at the failover site. This is particularly relevant to smaller businesses that require enterprise level systems and data availability with a smaller budget.

High Availability Clustering
High availability technologies protect applications, cost effectively avoiding complex and expensive alternatives usually reserved for mission critical systems. Importantly this eliminates a requirement for standby server hardware.

Management and Automation
Due to the encapsulation of the entire operating system and applications into a single file template, virtual machines can be rapidly provisioned or cloned, allowing the following benefits:

		Run heterogeneous Operating Systems as virtual machines on one physical machine.
		Dynamically allocate resources between virtual machines.
		Performance of the server estate can be monitored in terms of CPU, Memory and Disk I/O.
		Operations can be automated through scheduling and alerting to ensure business priorities are catered for.
		Access and level of administration can be delegated to varying levels of administrator to improve security.
		Services for grouping, resource management, availability and mobility.
		Zero downtime from hardware failure through cluster based availability.
		Load balancing as resource demand is monitored and allocated accordingly from a pool of physical resources. This allocation is based on pre defined rules set by the administrator reflecting the demands of business priorities.
		The systems administrator can monitor and manage a larger pool of resources more effectively through simplified and centralised management.

Automate End To End IT Processes
Virtualisation platforms enable the administrator to manage all virtual and physical assets, across multiple operating systems from a single interface.

Test Lab
Virtualisation offers the opportunity to streamline the process and management of the software life cycle. The cost of development, testing, QA and deploying live can be significantly reduced whilst improving the quality of the software deployed. Often testing involves maintaining multiple environments or mirror systems containing underutilised server hardware.

The time dedicated to repetitive systems setup and provisioning whilst troubleshooting can be avoided through automation. The cost of unresolved defects entering the live environment is also avoided as more thorough testing can take place as a result of speeding the process up.
Virtualisation allows the developer to create a library of system states that can be stored and re-provisioned very rapidly, avoiding the costly 1-1 server to application/ systems state ratio.

To take best advantage of all the features , shared storage is required. For the budget conscious IT Director the use of cheap and reliable Network Attached storage running iSCSI or Network File Service (NFS) is an excellent option.

Existing servers can be repurposed as virtualised servers, further containing costs.