I T S T R A T E G Y G U I D E

GE T T E C H N O L O G Y R I G H T

VIRTUALIZATION:
GET READY FOR
THE NEXT STEP
OVERVIEW: WHEN, NOT IF 2
GETTING A GRIP ON MULTIVENDOR VIRTUALIZATION 3
VIRTUALIZATION: TIPS FOR AVOIDING SERVER OVERLOAD 7
TEST CENTER GUIDE: VIRTUALIZATION FOR THE REST OF US 10
OPEN-SOURCE VIRTUALIZATION: WHO’S BITING? 13
SERVER VIRTUALIZATION: HOW FAST IS THE PACE OF ADOPTION? 16
Q&A: THOMSON REUTERS’ EXEC ON MASSIVE VIRTUALIZATION PROJECT 17

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C O M P L I M E N T S O F
 IT STR ATEGY GUIDE

OVERVIEW

VIRTUALIZATION:
THE QUESTION
IS WHEN, NOT IF
IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY STARTED VIRTUALIZING YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE,
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

A
t the risk of stating the obvious, virtualization is the future Microsoft keeps adding improvements to the foundation of Hyper-V,
of IT. Interestingly, it’s the history of IT as well, when you and offers features competitive to the rest of the field, it may get
think of mainframes, OS/400, and so forth. Everything old real traction.
is new again. Meanwhile, more and more software vendors are distributing their
But the world of contemporary virtualization has not jelled yet. products in VM form. Add a surplus of server processing power at ever-
Multiple vendors offer various products, each with their pros and cons decreasing prices, and virtualization makes sense from every angle of
and price tags—all the way from completely free to tens of thousands of the datacenter. Even large-scale applications and servers that would
dollars in licensing costs. otherwise be built on bare metal can benefit from virtualization by
The market is not quite so fragmented as it once was. Clear leaders leveraging the high-availability and dynamic load balancing features
have formed, with VMware still leading the charge. Citrix’s acquisition of modern hypervisors.
of XenSource has proved to be a smart move so far, and the marriage It’s clear that virtualization will continue to become cheaper and
of these two technologies looks healthy. Microsoft’s Hyper-V holds more widespread. Servers will be purpose-built to run embedded
down the distant third, but the company has recently added live migra- hypervisors and the processing power available per-rack will rise
tion—and made licensing much simpler by including four VM licenses substantially, as will the number of virtual servers a single physical
for each physical installation of Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. If server can handle. This is only the beginning. •

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 IT STR ATEGY GUIDE

IN-DEPTH

GETTING A GRIP
ON MULTIVENDOR
VIRTUALIZATION
MOST SHOPS ALREADY USE PRODUCTS FROM DIFFERENT PROVIDERS, SURVEY SAYS.
BY BETH SCHULTZ, COMPUTERWORLD

J
eff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization, and tions, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Server for Macs, VMware
that task will most likely fall on his shoulders. In Allison’s perfect ESX and Xen variants from companies such as Citrix, Oracle, Novell, Red
world, however, he’d leave that to the desktop experts. But virtual- Hat and Sun (although this last one may disappear, as essentially did
ization has never been a perfect world, and it’s even less so now the Virtual Iron hypervisor, once the Oracle acquisition closes).
that companies are implementing multiple vendors’ virtualization software. These same vendors plus other, more specialized providers—such
As a network engineer with the Florida healthcare organiza- as Neocleus, Phoenix Technologies and Virtual Computer—have begun
tion Health First, Allison is charged with managing the virtual server peppering the market with desktop virtualization products or bare-metal
infrastructure, and he’d like to keep it that way. He’s all for desktop client hypervisors.
virtualization; it’s just that he’d much prefer the traditional keepers of That all adds up to a lot of choices for IT managers. In fact, research
the end-user machines oversee the project, thank you very much. from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) shows that the vast ma-
His reticence to take on the project is partly due to unfamiliarity with jority of enterprises already are grappling with the issue—if not in produc-
the desktop arena and partly due to the burden that comes along with tion then in test and development environments. In a mid-2008 survey
managing and supporting PCs, Allison says. of 627 enterprise IT executives at global companies of varying sizes, only
Health First, in Rockledge, Fla., uses VMware server virtualization 7% of respondents said they had only one virtualization supplier, says
and Citrix Systems desktop tools. The IT organization could make the Andi Mann, an EMA research vice president. Survey respondents broke
desktop virtualization call in either vendor’s favor. It has been conduct- out as follows: 28% from a large enterprise, 37% from mid-sized to large
ing proof-of-concept tests of VMware View (formerly Virtual Desktop company and 36% from an SMB.
Infrastructure, or VDI) and Citrix XenDesktop. And while a multivendor virtualization environment can provide ben-
efits such as lower costs and best-of-breed product selection, manag-
FACING INCREASINGLY COMPLICATED SCENARIOS ing all this diversity can be a killer. At Health First, should the desktop
Indeed, the overall server hypervisor market is becoming rich with op- virtualization project proceed from testing to deployment, Allison expects

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 IT STR ATEGY GUIDE

IN-DEPTH

to maintain a siloed management approach—the A SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

virtual server infrastructure over here, the virtual BEST PRACTICES The right management tool is critical. “Skills for
desktop infrastructure over there and never the managing virtualization are among the biggest
Five tips for working with multiple
twain shall meet. virtualization technologies: inhibitors for deploying virtualization technology.
That’s a tactic many will take, at least in the So the best advice I can give [enterprise IT orga-
short term, to get over the immediate manage- AIM FOR A “SINGLE PANE OF GLASS” nizations] is to look for toolsets that will manage
ment hurdle. But as a best practice, IT staffers from which you can manage any virtual- across vendors,” EMA’s Mann says. Unfortunate-
really ought to figure out a way to handle ization technology, server or desktop. ly, he adds, these aren’t too common today.
distinct virtualization technologies in a cohesive LOOK FOR MANAGEMENT TOOLS that “For the most part, virtualization management
way so they can provide as adaptable and flex- integrate with third-party products, and virtual system management tend to focus
ible an infrastructure as possible, experts say. including those used in the networking on VMware. That’s fair, since it’s an 89% market
One of the smartest moves an enterprise and storage environments that round out leader at the moment. But I’m seeing adoption
IT manager can make is to find a way to create a virtual data center. of Hyper-V and Xen in many enterprises,” Mann
processes for functions such as provisioning and AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, says. Citing the mid-2008 survey, he says more
monitoring that can be repeated across any hy- including for processes such as change than 30% of respondents planned on bringing
pervisor environment, says Matt Brooks, senior management and virtual machine migra- Hyper-V into their IT infrastructures and upwards
enterprise architect at Dell. “If you don’t, the risk tion, and rely on policy and workflow of 40% planned on adopting one Xen hypervisor
is building up mini-infrastructures around each engines for this automation. or another.
hypervisor, and that’s really what we’re trying to DEVELOP PROCESSES that you can re- VMware, for its part, has a sophisticated
get away from with virtualization,” he says. peat within any hypervisor environment. management toolset, but it’s focused on its own
Brooks speaks from experience—lots of it. ENHANCE YOUR SERVER MANAGE- hypervisor. The company has not seen the need
Dell has a massive virtual infrastructure, current- MENT GROUP with people who under- among its customers for management of multiple
ly comprising more than 6,200 virtual machines stand one particular type of hypervisor hypervisors in a production environment, a compa-
in a mixture of hypervisors split 60-40 between but not to the exclusion of another; in ny spokeswoman says. As such, its development
the test/dev and production environments. “We other words, cross-training is critical. resources are best spent at this point on providing
see this as being a multi-hypervisor world, and more value for vSphere, according to Bogomil
although we’d like to have the fewest amount of Balansky, senior director of product marketing.
hypervisors as possible, anything that enables us to optimize we’re very VMware does, however, coordinate with vendors of management
happy about,” he says. Brooks wouldn’t specify which vendors’ hypervi- tools used for managing physical servers. It shares APIs and has a
sors Dell is using. plug-in architecture that aims to provide “seamless” management of the
“We had so many different processes to manage in our physical envi- physical with the virtual, the spokeswoman adds.
ronments, we really want to consolidate that down to build up same veloc- Such a coordinated view is highly desirable among enterprise IT
ity in how we manage, deliver and monitor in the virtual environment,” managers, says Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA’s Infra-
Brooks explains. “The key is looking for commonalities and making sure structure Management and Automation business unit. That was among
organizational and management practices, from a processes perspective, the findings of a study conducted in December 2008 and released late
are repeatable,” he says. last month by the IT Process Institute.

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Jointly sponsored by CA and VMware, the study collected data from DynamicOps’s Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), for example, has
323 North American IT organizations. enabled one global investment firm to finesse management of different
“A lot of customers are recognizing that virtualization is great, and virtualization technologies in its server and desktop environments—VM-
works wonders, but certain environments will not be virtualized and ware ESX for the former, and Citrix XenDesktop in the latter. “VRM is al-
so they need to figure out how to manage and automate both worlds ready helping to break down these barriers and remove the discussions
together,” Elliot says. around the technology. It helps us focus more on service offerings,” says
Microsoft, on the other hand, provides cross-platform and heteroge- an IT engineering manager at the firm who requested anonymity.
neous management tools in its System Center Virtual VRM’s self-service feature allows more than 250
Machine Manager. “That’s unusual, but very positive,” users in the company’s development community to
EMA’s Mann says. • spin up virtual desktops as needed. “The self-service
Today, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) can manage “A lot of customers are capability alone has freed our operational teams to
the Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server hypervisors plus focus on other tasks” at a rate of twice the normal
VMware’s ESX and ESXi hypervisors through integration
recognizing that virtu- workload of a full-time employee, the manager says.
with VMware vCenter Server (formerly Virtual Center). alization is great, and Plus, he adds, “VRM integrates well with third-party
Management of Citrix XenServer will be forthcoming, says works wonders, but cer- technologies.”
Edwin Yuen, a technical product manager with Micro- That said, the investment firm hasn’t taken the
tain environments will
soft’s virtualization group. step of adding a second server-based hypervisor into
“From one management pane, you can sort through not be virtualized and the mix—not yet, anyway. “We do not see [Hyper-V]
and look at virtual machines on a per-server basis, from so they need to figure being a viable solution for any of our workloads at
a logical point of view or by owner. We’re trying to provide out how to manage present,” says the IT manager. He notes, however, that
one software tool that an administrator can use for day- he plans to evaluate Hyper-V Release 2 upon its avail-
to-day management of all virtual machines,” Yuen adds.
and automate both ability for possible use in testing and development.
Input into Virtual Machine Manager is through a worlds together.”
Windows PowerShell command-line set for consistency • GO BELOW THE SURFACE
across platforms, Yuen says. “If you want to create a A tool vendor’s support of multiple hypervisors
new virtual machine, it’s ‘Create VM,’ not ‘Create new isn’t enough, says Kelly Beardmore, CTO of Tenzing
VMware’ or ‘Create new Microsoft.’ We’re trying to not just unify the view Managed IT Services, which uses PlateSpin Orchestrate to manage
but the management and the automation of the management of all ESX, Hyper-V and Xen hypervisors in its hosting infrastructure. Instead,
these systems,” Yuen says. Beardmore advises, it’s critical to make sure a management tool works
with each hypervisor equally well, versus supporting every feature of one
THE STRENGTHS OF THIRD-PARTY VENDORS hypervisor and supporting, say, half of another’s. “Most of them at this
Still, Mann says, for the most part enterprise IT staffers may find most point don’t,” he cautions.
of what they need from third-party vendors, including big management Given that a lot of these tools are fairly immature, IT managers have to
players such as BMC Software, CA and Hewlett-Packard. Smaller ven- push vendors on their development timelines, Beardmore says. Say Citrix,
dors such as Dynamic Ops, Vizioncore and PlateSpin, a Novell company, Microsoft or VMware releases a new version of its hypervisor full of great
also provide heterogeneous virtualization management. new capabilities. “You have to ask your management vendor, ‘How long will

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IN-DEPTH

it be until I’m going to be able to use those features through your tool?’” AT THE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL
On top of that, users need to ask their management vendors how While IT managers grapple with technology-related best practices, they
adaptable a tool might be to their needs, suggests Rich Krueger, CEO mustn’t overlook organizational ones, either, experts say. “We’re not
of DynamicOps. “Customers should be able to go to a vendor and say, going to have a virtualization group going forward, and we’re certainly
‘Here’s how we do business. How will your tool help?’” not going to have a VMware group and a Hyper-V group going forward,”
Success will come when virtualization administrators have tools that Mann notes. “The server team will have people who know Hyper-V and
support smart, not just mundane, work, says EMA’s Mann. Automation VMware, but they’ll all be responsible for server virtualization as part of
is a key part of that, with features such as application dependency managing the whole server environment.”
mapping, change management and live migration becoming increasingly That makes cross-training one last virtualization best practice not
critical as enterprises scale out their virtualization infrastructures. to ignore, Mann says. “You can’t afford to be just a VMware expert. You
At Tenzing, working smart translates into selecting a tool with strong can afford to have a 60 to 70% skill set on VMware vs. Hyper-V, and
policy and workflow engines that allow the company to create business somebody else might have the opposite.” This makes cross-training key,
rules without a lot of programming. “This is where our business rules will he adds. “That’s important for organizational flexibility.” •
be set,” Beardmore says. “If that [process] is complicated and difficult,
then everything is complicated and difficult, and that limits the intel- Beth Schultz is a freelance IT writer in Chicago. You can reach her at
ligence and power of a virtual data center overall.” bschultz5824@gmail.com.

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 IT STR ATEGY GUIDE

IN-DEPTH

VIRTUALIZATION:
TIPS FOR AVOIDING
SERVER OVERLOAD
DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP OF OVERESTIMATING PHYSICAL-TO-VIRTUAL SERVER RATIOS;
IT CAN COME BACK TO BITE YOU, BIG TIME. BY SANDRA GITTLEN, COMPUTERWORLD

A
s virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to in- you go into these virtualization projects with a false expectation, you’re
clude mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, going to get in trouble,” Mann says.
IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to- Indeed, overestimating P-to-V ratios can result in the need for more
virtual server ratios are things of the past. server hardware, power consumption, heating and cooling, and rack
Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of putting 20, space—all of which cost money. Worse yet, users could be impacted by
50, or even 100 virtual machines (VM) on a single physical machine, but poorly performing applications. “If a company thinks they’re only going
IT managers and industry experts say those ratios are dangerous in pro- to need 10 servers at the end of a virtualization project and they actu-
duction environments, causing performance problems or, worse, outages. ally need 15, it could have a significant impact on the overall cost of
“In test and development environments, companies could put upwards the consolidation and put them in the hole financially. Not a good thing,
of 50 virtual machines on a single physical host. But when it comes to especially in this economy,” says Charles King, president and principal
mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, that number tends to analyst at consultancy Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif.
plummet to less than 15,” says Andi Mann, vice president of research at
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in Boulder, Colo. KEY APPS WILL FIGHT FOR SERVER SPACE
In fact, EMA conducted a study in January 2009 of 153 organiza- So, why the disconnect between virtualization expectations and reality?
tions with more than 500 end users and found that on average they King says up to this point, many companies have focused on virtualizing
were achieving 6:1 consolidation rates for applications such as ERP, low-end, low-use, low I/O applications such as test, development, log,
CRM, e-mail and database. file and print servers. “When it comes to edge-of-network, non-mission-
The variance between the reality and the expectations, whether critical applications that don’t require high availability, you can stack
it’s due to vendor hype or internal ROI issues, could spell trouble for IT dozens on a single machine,” he says.
teams. That’s because the consolidation rate affects just about every as- Bob Gill, managing director of server research at consultancy TheIn-
pect of a virtualization project: budget, capacity and executive buy-in. “If foPro, agrees. “Early on, people were virtualizing systems that had a less

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than 5% utilization rate. These were also the applications that, if they monitor each VM for “telltale signs” of ratio imbalances such as spikes
went down for an hour, no one got upset,” he says. in RAM and CPU usage or performance degradation. “We’ve definitely
That’s not the case when applying virtualization to mission-critical, had to bump applications around and adjust our conversion rates
resource-intensive applications; virtualization vendors have been slow to according to server resource demand to create a more balanced work-
explain this reality to customers, some say. load,” he says. If necessary, it’s easy to clone servers and quickly spread
Once you get into applications with higher utilization rates, greater the application load, he adds.
security risks and increased performance and availability demands, con- “Because we did our homework with ratios of virtual servers by
solidation ratios drop off considerably. “These applications will compete examining the load on CPU and memory and evaluated physical server
for bandwidth, memory, CPU and storage,” King says. Even on machines workloads, we’ve been pleasantly surprised with our ratios,” he says.
with two quad-core processors, highly transactional applications that
have been virtualized will experience network bottlenecks and perfor- CONTINUOUS MONITORING IS KEY
mance hits as they vie for the same server’s pool of resources. At Network Data Center Host, a Web service provider in San Clemente,
Calif., the IT team quickly learned that when it comes to virtualizing
START WITH A CAPACITY ANALYSIS mission-critical applications, you have to consider more than just RAM.
To combat the problem, IT teams have to rework their thinking and dial “We originally thought, based on available RAM, we could have 40 small
back everyone’s expectations. The best place to start: a capacity analy- customers share a physical server. But we found that with heavier-used
sis, says Kris Jmaeff, information security systems specialist with Interior applications, it’s not the RAM, it’s the I/O,” says CTO Shaun Retain.
Health, one of five health authorities in British Columbia, Canada. The 40:1 ratio had to be pulled back to 20:1 at the greatest, he
Four years ago, the data center at Interior Health was growing at a rap- says. To help with that effort, the team has written a control panel that
id rate. There was a lot of demand to virtualize the 500-server production allows their customers to log in and see how their virtual machines are
environment to support a host of services, including DNS, ActiveDirectory, handling reads, writes, disk space usage and other performance-affect-
Web servers, FTP and many production application and database servers. ing activity. In addition, NDC Host uses homegrown monitoring tools to
Before starting down that path, Jmaeff first used VMware tools to ensure that ratios aren’t blown by a spike in a single VM’s traffic.
conduct an in-depth capacity analysis that monitored server hardware Pund-IT’s King says companies should also conduct rigorous testing
utilization. (Similar tools are also available from CiRBA, Hewlett-Packard, on their virtualized mission-critical applications before and after deploy-
Microsoft, PlateSpin and Vizioncore, among others.) Rather than looking ment. “You have to make sure that in terms of memory and network
at his environment in a piecemeal fashion by each piece of hardware, bandwidth, each application is stable at all times. For instance, if you
he instead considered everything as a pool of resources. “Capacity plan- know an application is harder hit during certain times of the year, you’ll
ning should ... focus on the resources that a server can contribute to the want to account for that in establishing your ratios,” he says.
virtual pool,” Jmaeff says. Testing will also help IT teams determine which virtual workloads will
Already, the team has been able to consolidate 250 servers, 50% co-exist best on a physical host. “You have to make sure that a physical
of the server farm, onto 12 physical hosts. While Jmaeff’s overall data server isn’t running multiple VMs with the same workload. Otherwise, if
center average is 20:1, hosts that hold more demanding applications ei- they’re all Web servers, they will be contending for the same resources
ther require much lower ratios or demand that he balance out resource- at the same time and that will hinder your consolidation ratio,” says Nel-
intensive applications. son Ruest, co-author of “Virtualization: A Beginner’s Guide” and founder
Jmaeff uses a combination of VMware vCenter and IBM Director to of the Resolutions Enterprise consultancy in Victoria, British Columbia.

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Instead, IT staffers should make sure that workloads are heterogeneous Finally, EMA’s Mann advises IT teams to seek out peers with similar
and well-balanced based on peak usage times and resource demands. application environments at large annual meetings like VMware’s
VMworld conference or Citrix’s Synergy, or through local user groups.
MORE VIRTUALIZATION-MANAGEMENT TIPS “Most attendees are more than willing to share information about their
Ruest also warns IT teams not to forget the spare resources that host environment and experiences,” he says. Rather than relying on vendor
servers need so they cannot only support their own VMs, but accept the benchmarks, get real-world examples of what has worked and what
workload from a failing host. “If you’re running all your servers at 80%, hasn’t at organizations with your same profile. “You’ll have a better
you won’t be able to support that necessary redundancy,” he says. chance at setting realistic expectations.” •
Most organizations will find they need to dedicate at least a month
to the capacity planning and testing phases to determine the appropri- Gittlen is a freelance technology writer in the greater Boston area who
ate P-to-V server ratios for their environment, Ruest says. can be reached at sgittlen@verizon.net.

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 IT STR ATEGY GUIDE

GUIDE

TEST CENTER GUIDE:

VIRTUALIZATION FOR
THE REST OF US
VIRTUALIZING SERVERS IN A SMALL TO MIDSIZE BUSINESS REAPS MANY REWARDS,
AND THE VIRTUALIZATION IS FREE. HERE’S HOW. BY PAUL VENEZIA, INFOWORLD

A
s the virtualization wave washes over datacenter after shops the same sorts of benefits it offers large data centers, even if
datacenter, it almost seems that small businesses have automation isn’t part of the bargain.
been left high and dry. And with licenses for enterprise-
grade server virtualization solutions costing tens of thou- A SIX-SERVER SCENARIO
sands of dollars, who could fault a business with only five or six servers To illustrate the impact that free virtualization tools can have on a small
for taking a pass? business, let’s take a typical small-business network. There might be six
But nestled among the high-class virtualization tools are plenty of servers, including a couple of domain controllers that also run DNS and
low-cost and even free solutions that fit right in with small-business DHCP services, perhaps a Microsoft Exchange server, a Web server, a data-
needs. Tools like VMware Server, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix base server, and a file server. These systems might be running on any mix
XenServer, and open source Xen don’t include the high-availability, load of hardware, with the most active services using the newest, fastest boxes,
balancing, or virtual server migration features needed in large-scale while the domain controllers and the file server might get by on older
environments. But even without these fancy features, they can make a equipment. For an office of, say, 50 people, this infrastructure is common.
big difference in the small business’s IT budget. However, looking at the utilization of those servers, it’s highly likely
Simply by moving your servers into virtual machines, you make them that none of those servers is running above 15 percent capacity. That is,
easy to copy, move, and consolidate on shared hardware. Because all they’re barely using the CPU and memory resources they have. Clearly
the virtualization solutions support snapshots, you can easily reset a you’ve got a whole lot more hardware than you really need.
virtual server to a previous version, should you need to roll back undesir- And resource utilization doesn’t paint the whole picture. For instance,
able changes such as a malware infection or an update gone wrong. the domain controllers might be running on dual-CPU servers with 4GB
In the event of a hardware failure, you can quickly spin up your virtual of RAM, when even half that would be overkill. Likewise, the Web server
server on backup hardware. In other words, virtualization offers small could be wasting a perfectly good dual-core processor if it’s only serving

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a few Web-based applications and an intranet page or two. are with VMware ESXi; it will run on any hardware that your Windows or
An infrastructure like this, in which plentiful hardware resources are Linux host supports. As mentioned above, however, this will negatively
required but underused, is ripe for virtualization. The first step toward this impact the performance of the virtual servers, but what you lose in
goal is to evaluate the options. For this network, they’re probably limited to performance you may gain in manageability.
four: Microsoft’s Hyper-V, VMware Server, VMware ESXi, and Xen. Microsoft Hyper-V is much like VMware Server in function: It installs on a
If this is a Windows-centric network and the only skills on hand are Windows server and uses the underlying OS to deal with the physical hardware.
Windows-based, then open source Xen might be out of the running. Of course, you must purchase a Windows Server 2008 license to use Hyper-V,
However, if any Linux skills—or the desire to learn them—are present, then and Hyper-V’s support for Linux guest operating systems is weak, at best.
Xen is a contender. It’s important not to confuse open
source Xen with Citrix’s XenServer, which is a commercial FIRST STEPS
offering based on the open source hypervisor. Citrix has With this infrastructure, the first step is to determine
•
recently released a cut-down version of the XenServer which servers should be virtualized. The obvious
product for free, in an effort to compete with VMware
It’s certainly candidates might be the Web server and one of the
ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. possible to repurpose domain controllers. Good practice dictates that each
The two VMware options, VMware Server and VMware existing hardware Active Directory domain controller run on different
ESXi, are fundamentally different platforms. VMware Server hardware, as a hedge against a single point of failure.
runs as a service on both Windows and Linux, dependent
for a virtualization The file server might also be a prime candidate for vir-
on the drivers and core of the underlying operating system endeavor, but it’s tualization as long as the host hardware can provide
to interface with the various components of the physical generally a better bet enough disk space to contain the files to be served.
server, including the disk, network interfaces, CPU, and It’s certainly possible to repurpose existing hard-
to buy a new server
RAM. VMware ESXi runs on bare-metal hardware and does ware for a virtualization endeavor, but it’s generally a
not require an underlying operating system. designed for a role as better bet to buy a new server designed for a role as
VMware ESXi is a bit of a double-edged sword. a virtualization host. a virtualization host. This server should have at least a
It provides significantly better performance than • single quad-core CPU (or two dual-core CPUs) and as
VMware Server, but is harder to manage for a novice much RAM as the budget will allow. If the file server will
admin. Also, while VMware Server supports a wide be virtualized, then of course the disks must be sized
range of hardware, ESXi does not. You’ll need to make appropriately. Here, you’ll want to make certain that the
sure that the equipment you use is covered by ESXi’s Hardware Compat- server has a RAID controller and that there are enough disks in the server to
ibility Guide. This is critical, because ESXi will not function on unsup- provide the requisite storage space when configured as a RAID5 array.
ported hardware. For our example, a Dell PowerEdge 2950 or HP DL380 G5 with a
The benefits of VMware ESXi over VMware Server are many, however. single quad-core CPU, 16GB of RAM, and four 72GB SAS drives in a
By eliminating the underlying host OS, ESXi puts virtual servers closer RAID5 configuration would do the trick. This would provide for roughly
to the underlying hardware. They will be faster and more responsive on 200GB of storage for all virtual servers and plenty of RAM. Addition-
ESXi than on VMware Server and other hosted solutions. ally, these servers can be upgraded with another quad-core CPU in the
VMware Server installs on either Linux or Windows, and it runs as a future. At the time of this writing, both of these systems are included in
service. There are no hardware restrictions with VMware Server as there the VMware ESXi hardware compatibility guide.

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GUIDE

BUILDING THE BOX MAKING THE MOVE

The next step is to install the virtualization software. If it’s VMware ESXi, then After the virtualization layer is installed, your physical-to-virtual transition is
this is a free download that can be burned to a CD and installed simply by simply a matter of building the virtual servers and migrating the services.
booting the CD and stepping through the installer. The management of VM- Although VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and others offer “P2V” migration
ware ESXi is handled via a Web interface or the VMware Infrastructure Client tools, you’re frequently better off rebuilding these servers from scratch
included with the package. Citrix’s XenServer installs essentially the same rather than migrating them from their physical hosts. This is especially true
way as VMware ESXi, and is also managed via an included client. for domain controllers, which should always be fresh-built, and for any
If VMware Server is your choice, then the underlying operating system must servers that have gathered the weight of a few years of operation. Taking the
first be installed, whether that’s Microsoft Windows or a Linux distribution. time to lay down fresh installs will reduce complications later on.
There are several benefits to choosing Linux as the basis for a VMware In our example, we started with six physical servers, and by virtualizing
Server installation. The installation footprint of the Linux distribution can one domain controller, the Web server, the file server, and perhaps even
be extremely small and still support VMware Server, and the performance the database server—depending on load—we reduced four physical servers
of VMware Server is arguably better with a Linux foundation than with a to one. This leaves the Microsoft Exchange server still running on its own
Windows foundation. In addition, if you choose a community-supported physical server. Not that Exchange servers have not been successfully virtu-
Linux distribution such as CentOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu, you will not have to alized, but the load on Exchange is often too much for a low-end virtualiza-
pay licensing fees as you would for Windows. tion installation.
In either case, the VMware Server installation is generally very straight- Thus, we’ve reduced the total number of physical servers by half, while
forward. On Windows, it’s a matter of downloading the software from still providing the services required by the network. Also, by leveraging the
VMware and running the installer. On Linux, it’s the same, though this is snapshot features of the virtualization solutions, you can save time and effort
generally done from the command line and not via GUI. by taking snapshots of the virtual machines before you apply service packs
Once VMware Server is installed, it can be managed from the Web UI or application updates. If there’s a problem with the update, you can quickly
or from the VMware Server Console application that is installed on a roll the server back to the snapshot and be back in business very quickly.
Linux or Windows workstation. Generally speaking, managing a VMware With the wide array of low-cost, high-powered servers and free
Server installation is simpler via the VMware Server Console application virtualization solutions available today, there’s very little reason not to add
than via the Web interface. virtualization to the SMB toolbox. In fact, many businesses will find they can
If Hyper-V is the chosen solution, then it’s simply a matter of installing run their entire infrastructure with only two servers, using freely available
Windows Server 2008 and choosing to install Hyper-V. The Hyper-V manage- virtualization frameworks. As with any IT endeavor, it will take time to adjust
ment console is built around commonly used Windows management frame- the solution to the needs of the business, but the benefits can be very
works, and anyone familiar with Windows servers should take to it quickly. significant—especially when balanced against the low cost of entry. •

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IN-DEPTH

OPEN-SOURCE
VIRTUALIZATION:
WHO’S BITING?
COST IS A BIG MOTIVATOR, AND SO IS THE ABILITY TO TWEAK THE SOFTWARE.
BY NICOLE LEWIS, COMPUTERWORLD

V
irtualization is unarguably one of the biggest trends of the sky says that by building monitoring tools and integrating them with the
past few years, and open-source software has been on the Xen platform he’s been able to mitigate network attacks.
IT radar for a while now. So does that make open-source “If an attack manages to break into the system, our embedded script will
virtualization twice as much of a good thing? shut down the compromised virtual machine immediately and bring another
At least some corporate IT departments think so. They’re turning to virtual machine up, in real time with no effect on users. That’s something
open-source software as part of their virtualization mix. Sure, sav- that you can’t get from any closed-source solution,” Yazhemsky says.
ings are a big factor, but so is the ability to tweak the software to suit As a result, the organization is able to invest less in security than it
specific requirements. would otherwise have to, he says. His calculation is that LAO spends
Just ask Stan Yazhemsky, manager of IT operations at Legal Aid On- about 40% less in security software and management costs than it
tario (LAO), which uses Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenServer, a management would have otherwise, “because we can script events that proactively
tool running on the open-source Xen hypervisor. search for any changes,” Yazhemsky says.
XenServer’s open APIs give him and his team of three Linux engi-
neers better access to and control of advanced functions, especially OPEN-SOURCE VIRTUALIZATION—TINY BUT GROWING
security, Yazhemsky says. Despite its fans, the overall market for open-source virtualization is very
LAO, a non-profit corporation that provides legal advice and services small indeed, though it is expected to grow.
to low-income individuals, has 200 locations across Ontario and hosts “Open source is less than 5% of the overall server-virtualization rev-
three data centers. Those data centers house 239 Windows servers and enue market share, but could nearly double by 2012,” says Alan Dayley,
68 Linux servers. Some 95% of LAO’s servers are running XenServer. a Gartner Group research director.
LAO has 154 terabytes of sensitive data such as client/lawyer infor- Open-source hypervisors including Red Hat Inc.’s KVM and Xen—
mation, financial files and individual case loads that span everything used by both Citrix and Oracle Corp.—and the management tools
from burglaries to theft and murder. Security is a key concern. Yazhem- running on top of them are gaining strength in both adoption rates

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IN-DEPTH

and advanced features formerly found only in the likes of VMware, the “Oracle will probably end up with the largest open source for virtual-
virtualization market leader, Gartner says. ization installed base of any one of its competitors,” Claybrook predicts.
Gartner’s 2008 figures show that for the hypervisor market—in units, For its part, the University of Massachusetts is running Oracle VM be-
not revenue—Citrix had 2% and Virtual Iron held 1%. For 2012, Gartner’s cause it is such a huge Oracle shop in general, says Michael Poole, chief
projections are that Citrix will hold 6% of unit share, and Red Hat 2%. technology officer. “It made sense to choose Oracle VM . . . especially
Nevertheless, open-source virtualization will likely always remain with the significant number of Oracle applications we support.” He says
a small piece of the pie. “While companies like Citrix and Red Hat are the university has realized significant performance gains and consider-
going to see great growth, they are not going to take significant market able cost reductions in its operations.
share,” says Gartner analyst Phillip Dawson. “Most of the share change UMass is in the middle of an infrastructure-transformation project
will be between Microsoft and VMware.” that consists of many sub-projects. While planning a new primary data
And that’s a shame, says IDC analyst Gary Chen, because open- center and a more robust disaster-recovery and testing data center,
source virtualization software has a lot to offer. “A lot of people don’t UMass investigated many options and chose to standardize on open-
really know how good Citrix XenServer 5.5 has become,” says Chen. source Xen virtualization with Oracle VM and Oracle Unbreakable Linux
One potential huge market for open-source virtualization: cloud support. UMass started implementing Oracle VM a little over a year ago.
service providers. “If you’re a large service provider and you’re building a By next summer—the target date for the infrastructure project’s
cloud, you may have very specific needs, [and] you may need to modify completion—Poole says the university will reduce its physical servers
the source code and you can go with open source,” Chen says. from 500 to fewer than 300. It also expects to save close to $100,000
As companies like Amazon.com build out their cloud computing strate- a year in power and cooling costs alone. And UMass will have totally
gies and virtualize literally thousands of servers in their data centers, they switched from VMware over to Oracle VM.
will be looking at vendors offering cheaper virtualization solutions with well- The university’s IT infrastructure is managed and monitored with Oracle
developed management tools that they don’t have time to build, predicts Enterprise Manager, and UMass makes extensive use of Oracle’s People-
Bill Claybrook, a former Aberdeen analyst who now has his own technology Soft ERP, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle DB, Oracle Real Application Clus-
research firm, New River Marketing Research, based in Concord, Mass. ters RAC and Oracle WebLogic servers. UMass is adding Oracle Business
Under this scenario, he says, Citrix’s attractiveness will increase. Intelligence Suite and the Oracle Identity Management Suite to its lineup.
“Citrix is one company out of all of those vendors that could make some “We’re a big Oracle shop. It was important to us to buy into the logic
money in cloud computing by providing a free Xen hypervisor and mar- that says Oracle is developing and testing all of its applications on the
keting its management tools at a reasonable price,” Claybrook says. Oracle infrastructure components, including Oracle VM, and getting the
kinks out of the system, or at least reducing them before they get into
IS ORACLE’S ROLE BROADENING? general release,” Poole says.
Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Virtual Iron and Sun Microsystems, and Poole explains that one of the university’s biggest successes to date
their respective virtualization technologies, could prove interesting long has been the virtualization of its Blackboard Vista learning management
term. While most observers expect Oracle’s open-source virtualiza- system. Through this, professors distribute content, exchange e-mails
tion software to be a hit primarily in existing Oracle shops, Sun’s large and engage in live discussions over the Internet with 63,000 students.
customer base may give Oracle a chance to penetrate a greater number Before it was virtualized, the Blackboard Vista application ran on 40
of corporate IT departments, says Claybrook. separate Solaris-based application servers. Today the number of physi-

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IN-DEPTH

SERVER VIRTUALIZATION STATS

The rising tide of server virtualization use will lift all Percentage of servers that run virtualization now 19%
boats, including the use of open-source software.
There are approximately 5.8 million virtual machines Percentage of servers that will run virtualization next year 28%
in use today, but by 2012 that number will grow to 58
million, a tenfold leap, Gartner says. Percentage of servers that will run virtualization in 2012 50%
SOURCE: GARTNER GROUP

cal servers running the application has shrunk to 5 and performance ture in two. Its office environment uses VMware to run Microsoft Exchange,
has quadrupled, Poole says. Microsoft SharePoint and Windows File Server. On the production side, to
By using Oracle VM to virtualize Blackboard Vista, Poole says, “We’ve power the Web sites, the company has deployed Oracle VM.
seen a very significant reduction in hardware while at the same time “We weren’t a good candidate for VMware’s advanced functionality
dramatically improving upon performance and scalability.” Poole estimates because these boxes aren’t mission critical, single-point-of-failure systems,”
that the difference in the cost of the hardware alone was nearly $300,000. says Nicholas Tang, Interactive One’s vice president of technical operations.
But before going with open-source virtualization, it’s important to have “As a result, we don’t do a lot of VM-level clustering and automated failover.”
a staff with the right Linux/Unix background, recommends Richard Cote, After discussing the possibility of using VMware for the firm’s produc-
systems architect and technical lead at the University of Massachusetts. tion environment, Tang’s assessment was simple: “VMware doesn’t do any
“If I were making a decision at a small company that only had Windows- better job than Xen does for ... quickly building a virtual environment and
savvy tech administrators I’d probably look at VMware or Hyper-V if I did not efficiently reallocating resources. VMware cost two or three times more
have a Linux or Unix group to support me. If you come from a traditional than what we paid for Oracle VM, and in the end it wasn’t worth it.”
Unix-savvy staff then you’re going to be drawn toward Xen,” Cote says. Since using Oracle VM, Tang says, he’s retired 60 servers, has real-
ized greater utilization of resources and is using open-source tools like
SMALL BUSINESSES MAY FIND MUCH TO LIKE Fedora’s Cobbler, a network installation tool, and other software like
Server virtualization growth is expected to increase in small- to mid-size cfengine, a configuration management tool, to build more functionality
businesses, and there, too, open source could gain a foothold. into the company’s virtual server environment.
Gartner classifies small business as companies with 20 to 99 em- While analysts continue to speculate, and vendors continue to im-
ployees and less than $50 million in revenue. Mid-size companies have prove their products, in the end, IT managers will have to make up their
100 to 999 employees and $50 to $500 million in revenue. “We expect minds based on their needs.
the [SMB] growth rate for virtualization adoption to be higher than the “Customers have to do the tests, and ask themselves if it will work
overall market through 2012,” Dayley says. in their IT environments and if will it meet their business requirements at
And even companies that are using VMware and/or Microsoft’s the right price and with the right skills,” LAO’s Yazhemsky says. •
Hyper-V may still find a place for open source.
Interactive One, a New York-based division of Radio One, provides Web Nicole Lewis is a technology and business writer. She can be reached at
properties for millions of African Americans and has split its IT infrastruc- lewis_nicole@bellsouth.net.

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QUICK TAKE

SERVER VIRTUALIZATION:
HOW FAST IS THE PACE
OF ADOPTION?
GARTNER PREDICTS NEARLY HALF OF SERVER WORKLOADS WILL BE VIRTUALIZED
BY 2012. BY ELLEN MESSMER, NETWORK WORLD

H
ow fast is the shift to server virtualization happening? ways to distinguish themselves in both features and prices, but for many
According to Gartner, 18% of server workloads this year the big question will likely be, “Should I choose VMware or Microsoft?”
run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28% VMware, which can boast higher density and a mix of operating
next year and reach almost half by 2012. system support and maturity in features, costs more than other offer-
Large enterprises have driven server virtualization over the last four ings, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V. As it begins to release improved VM
years or so, and VMware holds an 89% market share against a handful software, Microsoft seems poised to achieve growth in the SMB market,
of competitors that include Microsoft, Citrix Systems Inc., Red Hat and Gartner believes.
others. There are about 5.8 million virtual machines (VM) believed to Bittman said the migration from physical servers to virtualized ones
be in use today, said Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman, speaking on the is also tied to the revolution in cloud computing, where enterprises will
topic at Gartner Symposium ITExpo 2009, attended by thousands of be considering various strategies from private clouds to public cloud
high-tech managers from around the world. services and a hybrid model. The choices for an in-house virtualization
But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses platform that enterprises make now and in the near future are likely to
(SMB), and it’s in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to influence their cloud-computing choices, too, Bittman pointed out.
build a customer base. By 2012, VMware’s share is expected to shrink Virtualization is “not a commodity,” Bittman noted. There’s no com-
to 65% but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a tenfold monality in the switching or management at this point, and mixing and
leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27% share, Citrix matching among VM vendors is not a likely for now. But he noted virtual-
6%, Red Hat 2% and others about 1%. ization provides dynamic provisioning, potential for disaster-recovery
Small enterprises will be “looking at a much more level playing support, as well server consolidation, and “it’s becoming the default” for
field,” Bittman said. He said each of the VM software providers have the enterprise over the next few years. •

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Q&A

GETTING THE LOWDOWN

ON THOMSON REUTERS’
MASSIVE VIRTUALIZATION
INITIATIVE
INCREASE IN STORAGE UTILIZATION WILL PAY FOR SERVER VIRTUALIZATION
PROJECTS, CHIEF ARCHITECT SAYS. BY LUCAS MEARIAN, COMPUTERWORLD

I
nformation provider Thomson Reuters is massive on any IT scale. OVER TIME, HOW MUCH GROWTH IN YOUR DATA CENTERS
The company, which employees 50,000 people in 91 countries, HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?
has 20,000 servers and has been growing its 6.5 petabytes of Over the past five years, we’ve had 780% growth in storage, 450% growth
data storage capacity 40% to 50% annually and its data center in servers and 350% growth in power consumption. We’re trying to bring
power consumption by 20% a year. down the power consumption growth rate to an annual rate of 13%.
The company, which provides information to the financial, legal,
regulatory, healthcare and scientific marketplaces, was looking at building HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO THAT?
a new data center every two and a half years to keep up with growth. Its When you do all this consolidation work, in effect you’re recovering mega-
three data centers in Eagan, Minn., are using a total of 7.5 megawatts watts through the virtualization of existing assets. Then, over the next two
of power annually, so much electricity that the city was asking Thomson years, we’ll also be avoiding a megawatt of power growth through virtualiza-
Reuters to pay them to upgrade the electrical supply grid. tion of growth assets [future server purchases]. The net effect of this project
Christopher Crowhurst, Thomson Reuters’s vice president and chief is that within 30 to 36 months, we will have saved a year’s worth of growth.
architect of Architecture & Business Systems Infrastructure, said the com-
pany came up with a plan to double data storage utilization from 30% HOW FAR ALONG ARE YOU ON THE VIRTUALIZATION PROJECT?
now to 60% by using virtualization and thin provisioning technology from The conversion of physical servers to virtual is due to run until the end
NetApp Inc., and to use the capital expenditure savings from that project of next year. We’re currently running at 140% of plan, so we’re going to
to fund a server virtualization project using VMware aimed at transitioning complete early. We’re going to keep the project going, though. Because
roughly one-third, or 7,500, of the company’s servers to virtual machines. the project is funded by the storage optimization, as long as we’re recover-
Crowhurst spoke to Computerworld about the project. The following ing capital from that, we can continue to virtualize our server environment.
are excerpts from that interview. The reality is that the project will never end because the growth side of

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Q&A

our technology platforms will continue to drive virtualization. I think what WHAT KIND OF EFFICIENCY?
we’ll eventually start doing is extend this into a private cloud and move In our secondary backup NAS environment we’re running at about 104%
to do some self-provisioning for our business units as we get more confi- utilization because of deduplication and thin provisioning. So to me it’s
dent with the management tools in these virtual environments. not a case of filer sprawl.
We’re also very excited about the opportunity that 4TB SATA drives are
HOW MANY SERVERS HAVE YOU TRANSITIONED TO VMs SO FAR? going to give us because they’re going to allow us to do a physical consolida-
About 2,500 servers. But there’s also another part of our virtualization tion over the next year or two. When we talk to the likes of Seagate they’ve
strategy that ends up in a target goal of 7,500 servers by the end of got them in their labs and they’re testing them. The opportunity with the
next year. ability to throw a very small number of very large drives in a filer [NAS array]
and get multiple tiers within one storage device is tremendous. We see a
YOU SAID YOU HAVE 6.5 PETABYTES OF STORAGE, ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF huge advantage being able to go from flash drives to Fibre Channel to SATA
IT TAPE. HOW MANY STORAGE AREA NETWORKS (SANs) DO YOU HAVE? all in one array and provide full tiering capability. It totally changes the cost
We have two logical shared SANs and we have several dedicated SANs model for storage in our mind.
to specific environments, such as one environment that has to be
compliant with HIPAA for health care information, and another for public SO HOW ARE YOU CONSOLIDATING NAS NOW?
records databases that have to be segregated for privacy reasons. So We’re in the process of moving to that highly-tiered model. Currently, 90% of
there area wealth of different SANs. our NAS storage is what you’d consider a classic tier one environment. We be-
lieve we should get that down to 50% tier one; the remainder will be cheap and
HOW DO YOU BACK UP YOUR STORAGE? deep disk. The second thing is that currently we’re running about 30% of our
For our NAS [network-attached storage] environment we use disk for primary storage ... active. We’re going to try to drive that up 60%. That’s a fairly
backup and for our SAN environment we use a virtual tape library [near- conservative number but in effect doubles utilization of your existing footprint.
line disk array] and then store it to tape. So we’re expecting to effectively be able to grow within the capacity
we already have for a considerable period of time through the use of thin
ARE YOU EXPERIENCING NAS SPRAWL PROBLEMS? provisioning. And we’re doing this because of the advances in the storage
Well I have one and a half petabytes of primary storage on NAS. I virtualization technology coming out with NetApp’s OnTap software, which
wouldn’t say NAS sprawl is my problem, just storage growth in general is allows us to move data between filers and within filers using virtual volumes.
the problem. Thomson Reuters Professional is an information company.
We spend 41% of our technology [capital expenditure] on storage. Our SO HOW ARE YOU FUNDING THE SERVER VIRTUALIZATION PROJECT?
annualized growth rate for storage was 49% over the past two years. So Because of the storage optimization, we’re leveraging the deferred [capi-
I agree with you that we end up with a lot of NAS, but our NAS is not tal expenditure] spend from that and using that to fund our virtualization
the way traditional companies would use it. When you think of NAS you efforts with the servers. It will take us nearly three years to achieve the
think of people putting their Windows file shares on it. We’re using it for full benefits of this because we’re doing it as we’re refreshing our stor-
high-performing databases and for virtualization environments and for age infrastructure. So we’re doing it gently rather than with a big bang.
replacing and consolidating direct-attached storage in our virtualization That’s very important to us because as application profiles change
world onto consolidated platforms. So in reality we are driving great over time, as different usage profiles from our customers change over
efficiency through our use of NAS. time, we can move the data to the appropriate performance media. •

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