Next Generation Virtualized Data Center - Part 1

Journey to the Private Cloud will be difficult with today's technology and standards.  I find some of the motivation to take this journey interesting, as some CIO's are just simply following the crowd.  Is the motivation cost savings?  Agility?  Technology? 

Let's not spend time debating whether fully virtualized data centers will become standard or the norm. They will, and sooner than most may think. There are bigger challenges than how soon you can get 50% or more of your servers virtualized.  Things like network, tools, management and the list goes on. 

When I say Private Cloud, I mean an internal network that combines compute, storage, and other data center resources with high virtualization, hardware integration, automation, monitoring, and orchestration.  Things like self service, are key items to this definition.  Getting to this definition, with today's technology will be tough.  Let's look at the range of problems IT faces, such as multivendor environments, limited automation, and still-emerging technology and standards.

Standards are scarce indeed, making every purchasing decision dicey. The CTO must understand how every component interacts with every other component, but since extensive server virtualization has increased operational complexity, this can be an extraordinarly difficult thing to get your arms around. IT teams looking to conventinoal network and system management products for help are finding that these expensive tools are inadequate to the task at hand.  I would also say, don't look to just the normal vendors you have for years, like Cisco.  There are some real up and coming champions to watch.

I also tell my colleagues the only savings realized from virtualization is fewer physical servers.  Costs have increased via more expensive servers with bigger I/O and more memory, added cost of the hypervisor, and a much more difficult time to resolve problems when they occur. 

VMWare is still the go to vendor when IT organizations talk enterprise class server virtualization.  Many of my colleagues set this as a standard but have started to look at XEN and Microsoft, driven by cost(s).  Citrix and Microsoft are closing the gap to VMWare on technology, and feature/function.

It seems IT organizational leaders are all over the place when it comes rating the importance of virtualization features.  I feel high availability is a priority one, followed by price.  Both Microsoft Hyper-V R2 and Citrix XenServer offer high-availability features with a reasonable price tag. VMWare also offers high availability in its entry-level packages, except that it doesn't bundle features like Distributed Resource Scheduler, for machine load balancing, with its low-cost VSphere Essentials, making it an incomplete offering.  I also question the support cost(s) of the VMWare solutions.

Other features I find highly valued included live virtual machine migration, fault tolerance, load balancing, and virtual switching/networking. Citrix and Microsoft recently cozied up to Marathon Technologies to provide fault tolerance for their platforms.   There are features that VMWare offer that others do not, like storage DRS, which load balances data store I/O, and Storage vMotion.  Why I don't like and seek alternatives is cost.  VMWare's decision this year to increase its price beyond a certain virtual memory allocation.  VMWare later raised the limit, but that move only delays a price increase that could drive IT organizations to look at these alternatives.  If its bells and whistles like Storage DRS and Storage vMotion that VMWare expects to justify higher licensing costs, I am not buying it.  I see steady improvements to Hyper-V and Xen, and Oracle's integration of Virtual Iron into their VM product, there are lots of alternatives to consider. 

The challenge is mixing production hypervisors, that will not give your a unified, automated disaster recovery scheme.  Plus it will require some deep expertise if you want one policy to govern all of your systems, a good goal.  Make sure you take a holistic view of the environment, production, test, DR, and management. 

I will have a future discussion on "Master Disaster Recovery for Virtual".  Till then - keep your investigation and study on Private Clouds - don't be quick to jump on the bandwagon and put it in production. 

Keep it positive!

Scott Arnett
scott.arnett@charter.net