Consolidation's a Good Place to Start Virtualization Planning

By Lisa L. Morgan

June 10, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 8)
Virtualization is such a hot topic even business magazines are writing about it. Despite the buzz, virtualization can and does pose a number of challenges to IT professionals and data center managers that can be minimized by understanding the issues and using the right tools.

Before starting any IT project, it’s a good idea to have a sound plan in place, although not all shops have them. It may be that one department or office decides to consolidate servers in an effort to reduce rack space, power consumption, cooling and underutilized boxes. Or, it could be that IT, the data center manager or both are taking a long-term view about the strategic advantages virtualization can deliver. What you want to accomplish is a good place to start and it may change over time.

Quite often server virtualization begins with consolidation, but later other benefits become obvious such as business continuity, disaster recovery and fault tolerance.

“Consolidation is like a diet,” said Rebecca Austin, director of virtualization consolidation at IBM Systems and Technology Group. “It reduces overhead, [but as] new systems and hardware are added, bloat creeps back.”

Ironically, one of the reasons to consolidate servers is to put an end to server sprawl. At the same time, virtual machine (VM) sprawl can and does happen, which—depending on one’s perspective—is or is not a problem.

VM sprawl isn’t a problem if you take the view that several VMs can reside on a physical server. On the other hand, VM sprawl may be a problem if you consider the potential software licensing issues that may arise—especially given the ease and speed at which virtual servers can be deployed.

Vijay Sarathy, senior director of Sun xVM marketing at Sun Microsystems, said that the most insightful professionals look beyond consolidation to “bells and whistles,” like disaster recovery, because that makes virtualization more cost effective.

Another issue is who owns server virtualization? The CIO or CTO? A line-of-business manager? Data center managers? Systems managers? And what about network managers and storage managers?

Related Search Term(s): Data centers, virtualization, Citrix, IBM, Sun

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