Alan Smith, senior vice president, UC4 Software says that getting business applications on board is critical to success of virtualisation journey

Enterprises committed to a virtualisation strategy need to ensure that management and provisioning of mission critical business applications as well as IT infrastructure technologies are included in plans.

Spiralling energy costs, squeezing extra IT power out of fixed data centre real estate footprint and environmental concerns has shifted virtualisation from being a commodity tool to a centre-stage role in the IT strategy of many organisations. 

The history of virtualisation can be tracked back to the 1970s where mainframe computers could be virtually partitioned to host multiple guest machines. It proved an ideal environment in which to install and configure new operating platforms, upgrade existing systems and to allow software developers a sand-box for isolation testing. In its 21st century incarnation, history has repeated itself with virtualisation usually starting life deep within the data centre of most enterprises. IT operations and application development teams rapidly recognised the extra flexibility they could get from not needing to procure extra hardware for software testing or to service ad-hoc processing demands.

With the shift from commodity to centre-stage role for virtualisation, there is a corresponding shift in planning required to ensure that all IT layers within an enterprise are fully aligned to perform in a new virtualised landscape. In addition to ensuring that the underlying IT infrastructure components are in place each time a new virtual machine is provisioned, it is imperative that the business applications as well as the operational processes and procedures are fully established to provide the comprehensive set of services that end-users rely on to do their jobs.

Virtualisation in the dynamic data centre
Virtualisation transforms a data centre in to becoming a dynamic IT environment that can provide the flexibility and scalability capable of responding to the varying demands driven by a dynamic 24x7 global market place. However, while the ability to add and subtract processing capacity without needing to power up extra hardware offers enterprises greater agility, there are accompanying challenges that require addressing.

As each new server is spawned, the IT Operations team is left with the challenge of recognising that there is an extra machine available that requires managing and monitoring. This same team also assumes responsibility for manually routing workload to this additional resource, continually checking systems performance and being ready to respond to messages and resolve problems as and when they occur.

This increase in workload combined with the perennial lack of qualified, skilled personnel places tremendous pressure on IT Operations. Instead of continually trying to find, train and retain staff, organisations need to incorporate the tribal systems management knowledge that has accumulated over many years into the fabric of their virtualised environments. Adopting an automated approach would not only reduce operational pressures; it would also mitigate business risk by reducing the exposure of critical systems and applications to unaccountable manual intervention.

Ensuring that extra virtual machines are brought on line to cater for peak processing demands, optimising the distribution of batch jobs to complete ahead of critical deadlines through to automatically responding and taking corrective actions against errors are just a few examples of systems management challenges arising in a virtualised world that can be simplified using automation. Beyond the infrastructure layer there is an equivalent set of tasks and procedures that need to be performed to drive application processing which have traditionally relied upon manual interaction, either by data centre or end-user personnel. The virtualisation of applications generates a similar set of challenges and require equal attention if enterprises are going to realise benefits throughout their IT landscape.

In virtualised environments, the fixed relationships between hardware, systems and applications no longer exist. Hard-wired, proscribed associations, ranging from a command sequence in an operations handbook to fixed parameters embedded in a piece of application code, can result in different interpretations when presented in a virtualised world. Virtualisation introduces an extra layer of abstraction between physical hardware devices and the software systems that an enterprise runs to support its business.

Real world processing needs managing across virtual machines
At the IT infrastructure management layer, there are housekeeping and administrative tasks that need to be executed: back-ups, snapshots, DB clean-ups, file transfer handling, starting and stopping of virtual machines. At the business application layer, there are functional processes and procedures that need to be undertaken: sales data uploads, order processing, invoicing, logistics, production, analytics and forecasting, finance and accounting, HR, customer care. Bringing together the execution of these activities ensures that everything around business and IT processes are properly managed and maintained. The scope of activities required will usually go well beyond the capability of an individual business application or systems management solution. Enterprises need to manage all of the interfaces around their virtual environments. They also need to be able to integrate the real and virtual environments in such a way that they can fully leverage the breadth and the depth of functionality that can be derived from their core applications and operating platforms.

Forming logical association and utilising logical views when managing virtualised systems and applications, will allow IT departments to achieve greater flexibility and agility. When seeking to automate IT housekeeping procedures through to business processes, such as financial period-end close, creating a centralised single set of policy definitions that have embedded parameter variables not only ensures consistency and transparency across all virtualised machines and hypervisors - it will also reduce maintenance and administration overheads.

Establishing the availability of virtual resources, determining current systems performance and analysis of other metrics can be used at run time to optimise routing and dispatching of workload. Process definitions can be dynamically configured using parameter overrides to run in the virtualised infrastructure best suited to ensure end-user SLAs are satisfied.
 
Keeping track on what is happening where
Securing and administering all process definitions in a centralised repository will support change control management. There is no need to manually check that script updates, necessary because a new version of a backup utility is being rolled out, have been propagated to all virtual machines. Critical activities that need to be run on virtual machines are protected against unauthorised updates and illegal use. Being able to maintain a record and report on all changes made to process definitions, as well as details of who execute what, where, when and the outcome, supports enterprises in ensuring that their use of virtualisation does not introduce additional operational risk and compliant with IT governance strategy.

Enterprise wide visibility of application and infrastructure activities becomes crucial when managing and monitoring workload that spans virtual machines. IT operations and application support teams need a business view of what is happening across all systems. They could also benefit from using a set of tools, which are not platform or application specific, that allow them to deal with problems as and when they arise.

Introducing a layer of abstraction that enables the logical mapping of critical IT processes can provide increased levels of agility and flexibility when automating the execution of workload across virtual machines. Being able to associate logical processes with physical resources dynamically by setting parameter overrides enables greater agility. Creating templates of common processes that can be executed repeatedly, on behalf of multiple business units for instance, allows enterprises to scale their operations without adding significant overheads.

Automation can simplify management and control of virtual machines
Instead of dusting down an old IT operations run book and updating it to support its virtualisation strategy, enterprises need to realise that embedding knowledge and experience into automated procedures not only simplifies management and control of a virtualised world; it can also ensure smart decisions are taken at the right time in the right context. An automated approach translates to improved throughput, greater accuracy, fewer errors and reduced risk. Putting technology to work by allowing it to analyse resource utilisation and respond instantaneously, provisioning extra resource in a virtualised environment enhances productivity.