ARTICLE POSTED November 14th, 2005 The virtues of server virtualization By Jaime Gmach IT professionals dream of robust networking environments that exist in a dynamically expanding and contracting dream world. They want their computing architectures to be capable of processing weekly payroll, end-of-month commissions, end-of-year accounting, A/R, A/P and general ledger close-outs, and at the same time maintain their daily ERP, CRM and e-mail systems. Most servers, even in extreme conditions, rarely reach maximum processing power. In fact, in a typical workday environment, most (particularly Windows servers) rarely surpass a 10% utilization rate. Luckily for IT professionals, the dream world of server "morphing" — or virtualization in the real-world setting — is becoming a reality. Although most companies are not taking advantage of virtual server expansion and contraction capabilities today, it is possible to borrow CPU and/or memory capacity from other servers that are currently not being taxed, and then return that same CPU and/or memory capacity back to its original owners in its original state. Imagine servers being spoofed into thinking they have unlimited CPU and memory capacity and subsequently never going beyond processing/workload thresholds again! Server virtualization — why not now? Many IT professionals may be wondering, if server virtualization is available today, why aren't more IT shops taking advantage of this type of money-saving/resource-sharing solution? The answer is that it's as new a concept as hybrid vehicles were 10 years ago. Ten years from now, hybrid vehicles will no doubt be commonplace; however, many if not most IT pros don't want to wait 10 or 20 years to virtualize their IT environments. The following three steps are designed to get organizations driving toward autonomic computing. Step 1: Assess and validate Conduct an environmental assessment to define each department's server processing needs. Deploy custom-configured resource/environmental auditing agents to poll all servers in an effort to identify current totals of: CPU, memory, adapters and file/system capacity, as well as total used and unallocated disk space. In this effort, be sure to account for all archive file space, as it often takes up 30% to 40% of all data storage, much of it in duplicate and triplicate form. During this same assessment, it is also important to identify CPU, memory and adapter usage peaks, read, write and wait cycle peaks, as well as all data that has not been accessed over extended periods of time. Step 2: Rationalize and critique Critique your current server environment. Identify and consolidate processing-compatible applications to single servers, or virtualize existing multi-server environments to share processing attributes from a common pool. Only the second choice will reduce the purchasing of new servers for every new application. As a result, it is possible to increase utilization of existing servers from a typical 10% to 20% rate to a more effective and efficient 40% to 50%. More importantly, this drastically decreases unexpected outages while turning one-to-one, limited-growth environments into completely flexible and scalable solutions without trashing existing investments. As part of step 2, identify all mission-critical servers. Leave them in a one-to-one relationship for heavy-hitting applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel and large OLTP databases (such as Oracle). Then, consolidate less intensive applications (file and print, Exchange, SQL, etc.) and virtualize the remaining servers to form a common pool of hardware resources. Finally, configure the above-mentioned CPU, memory and adapter resource pool to be shared with the heavy-hitting servers/applications whenever it is needed. Step 3: Stop investing Look around. Imagine the amount of gas that would be saved if we would all carpool with at least one more person. With that in mind, stop thinking the only solution is to buy another server; chances are, you're not taxing your existing servers. Start "carpooling" your data and available resources. Tap into your existing hardware pool and reduce the number of servers you feel you have to buy simply to increase on-demand processing capacity. Odds are high that you don't need to add a server to increase your CPU and/or memory horsepower. In fact, if your IT environment is typical, you may be in a position to cascade many of your existing servers and reduce your related server budget for years to come. Autonomic computing In the very near future, many of today's production-level servers will not only be virtualized; they will also be configured for performing internal performance audits or "automated health checks" (from I/O processing needs at the CPU and memory level, to page and buffer credit settings at the kernel level). They will automatically adjust and/or reconfigure themselves according to their immediate system needs and be able to virtually morph — growing and contracting at will — to meet almost all on-demand needs with either pre-designed human involvement when starting out or, eventually, without any human intervention at all. Virtualizing servers will enable them to identify their own CPU, memory and adapter requirements. They will reach out to idle servers and borrow capacity in order to complete immediate tasks. Then, without human prompting, these virtualized servers will return the capacity when it is no longer needed. The ultimate goal of server virtualization is autonomic computing: capacity on-demand that provides an effective roadmap for managing information systems, regardless of size, processing demands, resource needs, time of day or night or human availability. About the author Jaime J. Gmach is president of Evolving Solutions. Feedback: feedback@snwonline.com Questions: questions@snwonline.com Technical difficulties: webmaster@snwonline.com