The many virtual benefits

Virtualisation Technology in Australia has followed global trends with many organisations – both large and small – adopting the technology. Virtualisation is the key to efficiency and reduced costs in modern data centres, whatever their size.

Average server consolidation rates are 12:1. Virtualisation not only improves utilisation of existing infrastructure and reduces cooling costs, but also frees up physical space required by servers.

The introduction of x86 servers in the 1980s provided a low-cost alternative to mainframe and proprietary UNIX systems. The broad adoption of Windows and the emergence of Linux as a server operating system in the 1990s established x86 servers as the industry standard. The growth in x86 server and desktop deployments has introduced new operational risks and IT infrastructure challenges for many organisations.

These challenges include:

Low infrastructure utilisation: Typical x86 server deployments achieve an average utilisation of only 10 to 15 percent of total capacity, according to industry analysts IDC.

Organisations typically run one application per server to avoid the risk of vulnerabilities in one application affecting the availability of another application on the same server. This “one application to one server” approach, combined with the relative inefficiency of most x86-based server applications, has resulted in significant under-utilisation of x86-based server resources.

Increasing physical infrastructure costs: The operational costs to support growing physical infrastructure have steadily increased.

Most computing infrastructure must remain operational at all times, resulting in power consumption, cooling and facilities costs that do not vary with utilisation levels. In some cases, the lack of adequate power supply represents the limiting factor to an organisation’s ability to deploy new applications and servers.

Increasing IT management costs: As computing environments become more complex, the level of specialised education and experience required for infrastructure management personnel and the associated costs of such personnel have increased.

Organisations spend disproportionate time and resources on manual tasks associated with server maintenance, and thus require more personnel to complete these tasks. Furthermore, automation of operational processes is inherently difficult given the complexity and heterogeneity of the environments.

Insufficient failover and disaster protection: Organisations are increasingly affected by the downtime of critical server applications and the inaccessibility of critical end-user desktops.

The threat of viruses, as well as security or natural disasters has elevated the importance of business continuity planning for both desktops and servers.

Desktop management and security: Managing and securing enterprise desktops presents numerous challenges. Controlling a distributed desktop environment and enforcing management, access and security policies without impairing users’ ability to work effectively is complex and expensive. Numerous patches and upgrades must be continually applied to desktop environments to eliminate security vulnerabilities.

Virtualisation was first introduced in the 1970s to enable multiple business applications to share and fully harness the centralised computing capacity of mainframe systems. Virtualisation was effectively abandoned during the 1980s and 1990s when client-server applications and inexpensive x86 servers and desktops established the model of distributed computing.

In 1999 VMware introduced virtualisation to x86 systems as a means to efficiently address many of these challenges and to transform x86 systems into general purpose, shared hardware infrastructure that offers full isolation, mobility and operating system choice for application environments.

VMware believes the market opportunity for its virtualisation solutions is large and expanding. IDC estimates that less than one million of the 24.8 million x86 servers and less than five million of the 489.7 million business client PCs deployed worldwide run virtualisation software.

It also believes industry trends towards more powerful yet under-utilised multi-core servers, and the increasing complexity of managing desktop environments will further accelerate the widespread adoption of virtualisation for both server and desktop deployments.

In Australia, based on a VMware customer survey in May 2007, organisations are embracing virtualisation, with more than 91 percent of organisations surveyed familiar with virtualisation technology, and more than 59 percent already deploying or currently implementing a virtualisation solution.

Research from the survey – conducted with 300 organisations across Australia reveals that server consolidation and utilisation are the initial drivers (79 percent and 70 percent) respectively for the deployment of virtualisation technology within their organisation.

Disaster recovery (DR) is also a key factor in the decision to implement a virtualisation solution, with up to 62 percent of surveyed organisations listing improved DR capabilities among the top five benefits sought from server virtualisation.

The Australian survey also revealed virtualisation starts in the testing and development areas of an organisation’s data centre, moving to virtualisation of mission critical applications on the x86 platforms, and eventually to other computing environments such as the desktop.

A major reason for this is that VMware products provide enterprise-class virtual machines that increase server and other resource utilisation, improve performance, increase security and minimise system downtime, as well as reduce the cost and complexity of delivering enterprise services.

By leveraging existing technology, VMware’s virtualisation software enables the roll out of new applications with less risk and lower platform costs and in much shorter timeframes.

In addition, organisations are able to leverage their virtualisation right across their IT infrastructure, from the desktop to the data centre, by virtualising computing, storage and networking systems with VMware software. Virtualisation makes key IT strategies such as disaster recovery more affordable, and is ideal for organisations which in the past would have been constrained by costs.

Data centres in the future will become always-on compute supply plants powered by virtual infrastructure. This virtualised data centre can be easily scaled up or out, will be dynamic and responsive to the needs of the business.

There are three key parts to this transformation catalysed by virtual infrastructure. First, a virtual infrastructure offers a dramatically new way of managing data centre capacity. Second, a virtual infrastructure has the capability to address most aspects of downtime and transform the availability metrics across applications. Finally, a virtual infrastructure offers new ways of standardising and automating key IT processes.