Billy Keefer, Senior Technology Specialist, CA EMEA says that virtualisation is changing the way that engineers and architects are thinking

Modern data centres are becoming subject to increasing constraints and pressures as a result of increasing operating costs, the density of equipment housed within them and the requirements for flexibility and to deliver business value. There are also other issues which are affecting the design and development of data centres like rising energy costs, green considerations and the challenge of cooling such equipment intensive environments. So how can virtualisation help overcome these challenges and what are the potential pitfalls?

Many of the issues affecting the modern data centre are a result of prudent approaches to server distribution and the relatively low cost of the servers themselves. It has been common practice to just put a new server in the corner to run a new application that is being deployed, but with space at a premium this is no longer feasible. Indeed, most data centre managers would readily admit that the utilisation of servers is somewhere quite south of optimal. All these factors have driven the start of a period of consolidation through virtualisation technologies.

And consolidation makes sense. CA recently carried out a survey of global organisations which revealed that the primary areas where virtualisation is providing benefit include improved server / system utilisation rates; improved server reliability and uptime; and improved business continuity and disaster recovery. The survey also showed a strong link between virtualisation and the ability to deliver against business priorities. 63% of organisations claimed that server virtualisation will be an “important or very important help for their organisation in improving business performance”; 66% felt that server virtualisation will be an “important or very important help for their organisations in reducing IT costs and increasing IT efficiency”; and 64% said that server virtualisation will help their organisations in improving IT service levels.

It’s no surprise, given these findings, that the premise of virtualisation is currently creating something of a buzz amongst the data centre community. It neatly solves the utilisation issue, gets around the lack of space, provides real business value and overcomes the fear of separate applications negatively impacting each other.

As with all these seemingly too-good-to-be-true ideas however, there are side effects which should be considered. The level of complexity in data centres is already a huge issue and virtualisation only exacerbates this problem. Again, the survey we carried out showed that many heterogeneous virtualisation deployments are creating issues such as server sprawl; increased configuration and administration requirements; difficulty with reporting and gaining complete visibility on server efficiency, performance and utilisation; and increased requirements to maintain more than one skill-set.

What this essentially highlights is the need for effective and all-encompassing management controls. It also gives a clear message that being able to simplify this process and gain a clear idea of how applications, servers and transactions are performing within this environment should be a central consideration. In fact the additional complexity has put some businesses off adopting virtualisation, but it isn’t something that is ever going to go away. IT, and particularly enterprise IT, is by its nature a complex beast – the key is to make the management of this simple.

There are also other knock-on effects to consider with virtualisation, such as storage infrastructure, security and asset management. The success of server virtualisation can be reduced if the storage infrastructure sitting behind it isn’t configured the right way. From a security and asset management perspective, businesses need to ensure that all servers have the right anti-ware software installed (anti-virus, anti-spyware etc.) and that the right licenses are owned for all the applications running. Whilst not the most efficient approach, throwing labour at this problem is feasible in a more traditional environment, but understanding how many applications have been installed and the status of security and anti-ware products in a virtualised set-up makes this whole process enormously time intensive and somewhat prohibitive. This added complexity cries out for a degree of automation in terms of asset management and software deployment and should be another important consideration when adopting a virtualised environment.

There is no doubt that virtualisation can and is providing benefits to many businesses and can certainly help alleviate many of the problems that are affecting the design of data centres – particularly those with limited space. However, it is important to understand the implications of such a project and be prepared to deal with them. Having the right infrastructure and management systems in place is imperative to the long-term success of virtualisation, but if done correctly, this success can be considerable.