Virtualization – The Pros and Cons, Just Making Sure You Don’t Do Things Half Glass’d

Looking at Virtual Machines? Worried about the potential business continuity issues? As with everything in Technology, new architectures have their upside and downside.  This narrative will try to flush out the issues.  This way you can determine whether the glass is half empty or half full.  We just don’t want you to do anything “Half Glass’d”.

So, software is winning the battle. It took a while, but ultimately, software saves the day. Just look at the device reduction we’ve seen with the Smartphone alone. No more cameras, MP3 players, watches, Daily Planners, video cameras, etc… It’s no secret, as evidenced by thousands of Virtualization customers; Virtualization can dramatically reduce the TCO of Data Center, Server farms, labs, development servers, etc…  However, as with everything in technology, there are, let’s say undocumented features just waiting to take a big chunk out of your assets.

So, to assist my readers, I present, the Pros and Cons of Virtualization…

The PROS

What you may not know is that your TCO may be reduced up to 60% and the move can provide a positive ROI within the first six months or less.  Bold statement, really? This capability enables organizations to realize significant cost savings in many ways including the following:

1) Reducing the number of servers required to support computing needs. Duh…

2) Reducing hardware support costs. The money issue. Without a doubt, the greatest advantage of server virtualization is cost. For example, suppose that an ISP purchased a high-end server for $30,000. In addition, it needs an operating system for the server. A copy of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition goes for about $8,000. Add in other components and the ISP could easily drop over $40,000 on a single server. Can you imagine if the server could only host a single Web site? The cost to the subscriber would be astronomical. On top of having to recoup a $40,000-plus investment in hardware, the ISP must also pay for bandwidth, salaries, building rental, and other business expenses before it can start turning a profit.

3) The Answer to Disaster Recovery. Most of you have been putting off that horrendous task of putting a Disaster Recovery Plan together. Basically it’s almost done for you. Most disaster recovery plans require building an exact duplicate of production data centers, requiring the purchase and maintenance of a large number of servers that are mostly idle. Not to mention the ease of add, move and changes to that configuration. In some cases, it’s the simple motion of a drag and drop to duplicate a server. One client described it, “it was as easy as dragging a file over”.

4) Reducing data center power and cooling costs. Go Green!

5) Reducing costs of network and storage infrastructure. Now did you guys think of this one? Because virtual machines running on the same physical server can share network and storage connections, consolidating servers with virtual infrastructure reduces the number of network and storage ports required. This brings down the costs of SAN and network switches, cables and administration.

6) Administration efficiency. Virtualization virtual infrastructure software makes it possible to centralize, streamline and automate common tasks such as provisioning, configuration, reconfiguration and migration.

7) Reduced Big Production Scheduled Outages: Another, you may have not thought about… Administrators can move live, running virtual machines from one host to another while maintaining near continuous service availability. This capability makes it possible to eliminate significant amounts of planned downtime for applications and users: running virtual machines can simply be moved to other physical servers when planned hardware maintenance is required and moved back when maintenance is complete.

8) Fault Tolerance Fault tolerance, i.e., virtualization allows customers to reduce unplanned downtime by making it possible to migrate running applications away from servers that show indications that they are likely to fail.

The CONS

Now we all know that the pinnacle of virtualization is Cloud computing.  However, before entering the Clouderhorn ride, permanecer sentados por favor! Even though the skies are slowly clearing, there still remain a few cloudy misconceptions about this new concept of utility computing.

1) Cloud Computing Is Designed For All types of Applications. Public cloud might be logical for most smaller businesses, new businesses, or new applications like Netflix’ streaming video service, but for large enterprises, completely abandoning many millions of dollars of paid-for equipment, and an immeasurable amount of process and skill investment, is frequently unjustifiable.  On top of that some enterprises still have applications that are 10, 20, or even 30 years old and still running critical workloads. Today’s crucial applications are going to be around – and running on private ‘legacy’ systems – for a long, long time.

2) Clouds are Simple and Are a Set It and Forget IT Technology. Really?  As just an example, IaaS Clouds can require significant amounts of system administration expertise because the elements that integrate with their applications, like images, must be customized.  There is no batch environment, nor a global file system.  For some reason there are those who sell virtualization software and cloud computing enablement platforms that imply that data integration is something that comes along for the ride. However, nothing gets less complex and data integration still needs to occur between the virtualized data stores as if they existed on their own machines. They are still storing data in different physical data structures, and the data must be moved or copied, and the difference with the physical data structures dealt with, as well as data quality, data integrity, data validation, data cleaning, etc.

3) Clouds are More Efficient.  This may be true; however, the question is for whom?  Centers run at >90% CPU utilization and >90% scheduled utilization. This may be sufficient for small to midsize computing requirements; however, with the high performance computing this may pose an issue.  Hence, unless you go Private Cloud, this may inhibit the application performance.  In addition, these Centers partner Vendors to field cutting edge systems and are more aggressive with technical risks associated with them.

4) Clouds are cheaper. Yes… yes… this is true.  Even a report this month by Gartner predicted that IT spending as a whole would drop by six per cent with hardware faring the worst with a predicted drop of 16.3 per cent, compared to software’s drop of 1.6 per cent. In fact, Reports of Gartner and IDC have shown server sales falling by 24 per cent, the worst decline since records began.  Point here is that we must be reminded that the total cost of ownership must be folded in, for typically, we forget that the bill for the cloud should include the consulting staff, administration, support.

5) Clouds are Secure. The No. 1 misconception cloud customers have is that their cloud provider is going to provide security services. All of the host-based protection tools you needed before are not going to be provided for you … In fact, this is the first paragraph that they put in their contract notifies buyer beware when it comes to security, they only go as far as providing best effort, but ultimately rely on the customer to provide their own security.  As far as monitoring is concerned, they monitor their system for their purposes, not yours.  They make sure that their SLA is met, which usually does not include your application’s performance and health.

So what do we do with this information?  Baby steps are prudent here.  This way, it regulates risk.  Virtualization is here to stay, but where you want to step on will be up to you.

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 20 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 333-8394 x 689