Datacenter migration the trend analysis of server virtualization

Datacenter migration server virtualization has come a long way in a very short time.At the beginning of its IT testing and development pilot project, VMware's vSphere was the only leading and reliable virtualization platform in the market at that time.Since then, with the citrix, red hat Linux and Microsoft company began offering their virtualization management application solutions, the IT enterprise customers began to gradually massive USES the server virtualization technology, and use virtualization as a priority IT strategy.

Now, server virtualization has entered the IT infrastructure of almost all sizes.According to a recent survey conducted by Spiceworks for IT professionals, 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises have deployed some form of server virtualization technology.
Virtualization is now seen as a mainstream architecture, and many companies say they are committed to deploying all their new applications in a virtualized environment.
But that is not always the case.The first applications that companies run on virtualized servers are often less critical applications.For example, Web and file servers tend to be more common early applications running on virtual servers.
Often the pilot enterprise customer demand for backup and recovery environment requirement is not high, its administrators often rely on the existing backup and restore tool, regardless of how virtual environment affect recovery.The failure of the pilot project application does not have a significant financial impact on the enterprise business, and the administrator will have enough time to figure out how to recover the application and data.
It is now quite common to migrate mission-critical applications to virtual machines.Applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP always have stringent usability and data integrity requirements.However, tools for backup and recovery are not typically built for the new unique needs of the virtualized server.
Further complicating matters is the fact that applications currently running in virtual machines often share resources.
When building a backup task, it builds dependencies in architectures that are often less valued.All these need to rethink the virtual server data protection strategy, in order to ensure recoverability can with the requirements of individual applications and enterprise organization is consistent with the overall business objectives.
First, the enterprise data center adopts the trend of virtualization.
Admittedly, the company currently has a lot of enterprise organization have adopted the preferential policy of virtualization, and the priority policy is all new applications must be run in a virtual environment.Migrating traditional legacy applications to virtualized environments, however, is another matter entirely.
Although the industry is now more and more attention to technology, and IT can for the benefits of enterprise profit, but according to Spiceworks company, according to a recent survey found that the stagnant's devotion to IT budgets.Companies are not keeping up with the demand for IT talent.IT is because of these trends that today's IT staff are constantly being asked to do more work with less money.
The inevitable consequence of flat corporate IT budget spending and the reduction of enterprise IT staffing is that the priority of projects involving traditional applications is reduced.It is true that newly developed applications can run on virtual servers and are dominated by the virtualization priority policies.But, just as "if it's not bad, don't get busy trying to fix it."Described by the proverb: due to the lack of drive equipment enterprises to realize natural scrap (EOL) spending, so they are usually not appropriate IT budget to the application from the traditional physical server to a virtual server.
For most enterprise organizations, regardless of their size, they are now dealing with a hybrid IT environment containing virtual and physical servers.This is not an ideal situation at all.The mixed environment complicates almost every aspect of server administration.It reduces the administrator of the production efficiency, increase the cost of management tool, knowledge about management tools between the administrator master too scattered, and could lead to availability of the application and data integrity is compromised.
Why deploy virtualization?
So why are there so many arguments around the deployment of virtualization?And why are IT organizations so obsessed with this technology?The simplest answer is that it helps companies save money.
When the enterprise business applications are deployed on a physical server, administrators, and capacity planning personnel will need to get together to discuss and make sure these applications need how many server resources.They need to estimate how much processing power, how much memory, how much storage space, and how much network bandwidth is required for the application.
Capacity estimation must also predict the future growth and demand peaks of applications.Ensuring adequate capacity to cope with future demand growth means that the physical servers of the enterprise will inevitably run at an average of 20% of their rated capacity.
This means that 80% of the power, memory, storage, and network capacity of the server's processors is idle.
1. Reduce capital expenditure.
Deploying virtualization enables a physical server to host multiple virtual servers.It also provides the ability to easily migrate virtual servers between different physical servers to balance resource requirements.Physical servers running virtualized software are often able to keep running at more than 80 percent of their rated capacity.Integrating business applications to a single physical server, each physical server has its own independent operating environment, can significantly reduce the number of physical servers in the enterprise data center.With fewer physical servers, IT organizations can further reduce capital spending, freeing up these funds for other business segments of the organization, thereby increasing revenues.Of course, there are many other benefits.
2. Reduce operating expenses.
A reduction in the number of data center of physical server also helps to save energy cost enterprise data center, and carbon emissions is the enterprise data center for investors and shareholders tracking measure of an important factor.Moreover, it enables the data center to host more applications, which is a key factor in the value of data center real estate.
From a management perspective, it is much easier to configure and split the virtual machine.If the application needs a new server, the administrator configures the virtual machine much faster than the physical server.This typically reduces configuration time from weeks to hours or less, helping to quickly develop applications.
It is also easier to manage virtual machines than physical objects.A virtualized administrator can manage more machines than just a handful of physical devices.This helps to improve administrator productivity and helps alleviate staffing problems in enterprise data centers.
Disadvantages of virtualization.
Of course, virtualization also has its drawbacks.Not all business applications are suitable for running on a virtual server.While deploying virtualization helps companies save costs, the technology can also lead to increased spending in some other areas.As with many technologies, the use of it without sufficient knowledge of it may aggravate the problem that it intended to solve.
Not everything can be virtualized.
Virtualization is not an excellent choice for all applications.Applications that are very sensitive to performance may not be appropriate.These applications are unlikely to tolerate sharing physical resources with other applications, and the overhead of running a hypervisor on the same hardware may not be welcomed by corporate customers.
There are a variety of applications that require their servers to have physical attachments, and such applications typically have unique driver software.Although virtual hypervisor software attracts most application use cases, it does not usually support these unusual applications.
Not all application software can be virtualized.For some application software, it may have a license to prevent virtualization.It can also be complex for some other applications.
Many organizations are using the old traditional application, the application of enterprise's key business is crucial, but due to a long period of time to upgrade and change for many years, so that the operation become very complex, so that the premises will be transferred to the virtual platform would be too risky.
2. Increased costs.
The cost of related components may affect enterprise customers' deployment of virtualization technologies.While virtualization can help companies reduce operating costs in the long run, the technology will also have upfront investment costs.
The host server used to run each hypervisor must be able to support the performance requirements of all virtual servers.These servers may be more expensive than the physical servers they replace.
In view of the current in a variety of tools available on the market, many of them are made by virtual management program provided by the supplier, so enterprise customer server and network administrators must receive professional training in virtualization technology.
3. Server spread.
Ironically, the problem of server sprawl, which was originally a promise of virtualization technology, is likely to be exacerbated by the deployment of virtual machines.
When the enterprise data center deploys the server without fully understanding the impact it will have, the server spread becomes an important issue in the data center.This often leads to data centers that are full of server hardware that needs to continue to consume valuable energy and footprint, and is not fully utilized.
Server virtualization solves this problem.Integrating many physical servers on a single virtual server can alleviate energy and space constraints.However, the convenience of configuring virtual machines can lead to overspread of servers.
4. Single point failure
Finally, one obvious drawback of server virtualization is that hosting multiple virtual servers on a hardware can lead to a single point of failure.If the physical server running the hypervisor fails, all the applications running on the hypervisor will not be available.
Ensuring data availability and data integrity in a virtual server environment requires new data protection methods.Although many virtualization deployment are dependent on the existing data protection technology, but the premise is: in physical server solution for virtual servers can also work, but in fact, virtualization infrastructure will bring the corresponding challenges.This is not only because the operating environment of the enterprise data center is unlikely to be all virtualized.
Iv. The unique backup problem of virtualization.
As applications such as ERP, CRM, and E-mail migrate to virtual machines, data protection in virtualized environments becomes more important.Unlike less critical applications, these new workloads typically do not tolerate data loss, and there is little downtime.Unfortunately, data protection software vendors often find themselves struggling to catch up with the rapid changes in virtualized operating environments.
In the early stages of virtualization, there are no officially approved backup tools and hypervisor interfaces that control the virtual machine.There is no formal API, which leads to a lot of temporary backup and recovery methods.
These methods are not recognized by virtualization software vendors, and upgrades to the hypervisor will inevitably undermine the backup tools, which in turn will expose data protection to risk.
One of the goals of server virtualization is to use physical server hardware more effectively.On average, the previous architecture used only 10% to 30% of the server CPU to leave enough capacity for periodic workloads such as backups.
Now, we typically see more than 80% of the virtualization server's environment utilization.This leaves a small extra capacity for other workloads.
Given the high availability of resources running on a virtual server, the backup software running on the virtual machine's host operating system has less capacity.The software will be important resources from running on the same machine separated business applications, and may affect on the same virtual other virtual machines running on the server application performance.
In addition to the backup problem, there are significant recovery problems in the data protection software for the virtual servers that were deployed in the early deployment.The lack of sufficient granularity to restore data to a virtual machine is usually a "all or nothing" proposition.For example, if you only want to restore a single corrupted file, this will be a big problem.
1. Backup problems for small and medium-sized companies.
If you are in a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), you may be at a crossroads when you choose the right data protection solution for your data.Turning to a virtualized server won't happen overnight.It is likely that your enterprise environment is a mix of physical and virtual servers running various business applications and will last for a while.This will bring many problems.
Conventional backup tools are primarily used to protect the physical server environment and often do not support virtualization.The system administrators of your enterprise are very familiar with these tools, and they will develop a variety of trusted standards and procedures for smooth management of backups and rapid and accurate recovery.
The new backup solution is usually intended to only protect the virtual server.Due to the special nature of the operating environment of the enterprise data center, many backup product vendors have slow response to virtualization requirements.This opens up opportunities for smaller, more flexible startups.
The start-up and development of new tools to solve the backup virtual server specific issues, but they usually do not supply to the existing physical server or involve protection of tape more conventional backup scheme.
Many small and medium-sized enterprises will find it necessary to support multiple backup tools in the short term, but this will increase the cost of software and support, and reduce the efficiency of administrators.
2. No proxy backup.
When considering backups, we need to distinguish between applications and machines.
The traditional backup software needs to be installed on the host operating system to communicate with the backup server that compiles and stores the backup data.Proxy software can help you back up your perceived applications.
Increasingly, virtualized environments rely on unrepresented backups.This method can backup the entire virtual machine, but less understanding of the applications running on the host.