Johannesburg, 26 Apr 2016
Trying to convince your board to move to a virtualised environment? ITWeb's Ansie Vicente interviewed Clint Wyckoff, Veaam evangelist, about the seven questions directors are likely to ask.
1. How does virtualisation affect a current IT division, which is already struggling to keep everything up and running?
Virtualisation makes some aspects of the data centre more efficient and easier to manage. For example, gone are the days of racking and stacking physical servers when a Web server is required for a new project. Deploying virtual machines (VMs) is fast, easy and simple, making scale and mean-time-to-delivery two of the key factors when organisations virtualise workloads. Other benefits are ease of management and lower power, cooling and real estate expenses due to the massive footprint consolidations achieved over the previously deployed physical machines.
These virtualised workloads do bring forth additional concerns when they're run and managed with solutions that were not purpose built for virtual machines. Some of those concerns stem from the drastic difference in how legacy workloads and virtual workloads are deployed, managed and handled. Tools that have been built for the physical data centre are not able to be easily adapted to handle the intense demands of their virtual counterparts.
For example, in the data protection space, traditional agent-based tools cannot meet the recovery time and point objectives of the fast-paced always on enterprise. VMs and their applications need to be accessible and meet the service level agreement that's been promised to the business. Legacy tools cannot provide this and thus enterprise organisations have been seeking purpose-built tools that allow them to successfully virtualise their most mission critical applications and services.
Organisations of all shapes and sizes from around the globe are being run in an always-on fashion, making any type of system downtime unacceptable. To overcome these challenges organisations are revamping the way that business continuity is achieved by making heavy investments in a hybrid cloud strategy. This strategy in many cases allows these organisations to utilise the massive benefits of hyper-public cloud providers.
2. At what point does the virtualised system start making their lives easier?
Virtualisation will make an immediate impact on IT and business applications alike. Mean-time-to-deployment will begin to decrease as lowered management overhead and expertise continue to be gained. True efficiencies will be achieved when all components of the virtualised data centre align: compute, storage and networking. These components are where the heavy investments continue to be made within the enterprise business segment. Enhanced high availability within the business is a must have as applications continue to be deployed within the virtual data centre.
3. How do you measure the effects of virtualisation? What are the metrics?
Total cost of ownership when virtualising a data centre includes decreased power consumption, lowered cooling expenditures and decreased server footprint. In the area of disaster recovery, business continuity and application availability metrics to keep a close eye on are recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
As previously mentioned, virtualisation has become a mainstream method of deploying application workloads. There is, however, a learning curve as things within a virtualised data centre must be handled and managed differently to how they are managed in the physical. Management, monitoring and availability tools must be purchased that align with this strategy. Hardware procured must fully support running virtualised applications.
4. What happens in the IT department after the solution is implemented?
Infrastructure benefits from increased manageability and being better armed to serve the requirements of the always-on enterprise. IT management benefits from lowered TCO of their data centre. The business benefits from increased application availability, faster deployment times and the potentials for increased performance.
5. What training is required within the IT department to move to a virtualised environment?
Typically, when management decides to venture down the virtualisation path, some form of technical training is desired by the architecture and administration teams. This training is usually recommended by the hypervisor, compute, storage, networking or cloud vendor as well.
6. What training is required for general (non-IT) staff to accept the new solution?
Non-IT staff would require environment specific training when the virtualised data centre extends out to the normal office worker. One way that this is achieved is via virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The training would be environment-specific and typically is led by internal IT.
A second example of non-IT staff consumption is when self-service capabilities are introduced. A typical scenario is when private and hybrid cloud techniques are used to provide access portals for requesting infrastructure and application server workloads. When accessing the self-service portal one can request an amount of compute, storage and networking as well as self-defining their protection policies that align with the application service level agreement. Once the request is made, IT is notified and the appropriate change requests would be placed into the enterprise IT service management tool.
This new deployment and request methodology would require environment specific training that is conducted internally. Enterprise learning management systems (LMSs) are trending in popularity, making the consumption of the material easier for the always-on office worker.
7. Anything else that is important around change management for virtualisation?
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework that focuses on managing an organisation's IT services, and is often considered to be a set of best practices to be followed. With virtualised environments, ITIL should play a large factor in the way that success is achieved. IT as a Service (ITAAS) and service management are the two main areas of focus. How are virtualised assets managed? How is change in the environment tracked? How are incident, problem and change requests related together?
These valid questions are most commonly posed to the infrastructure teams by the IT service management division of the enterprise. Discussions like these are often combative in nature and enhancing the communication between individual IT business units and infrastructure are an area for improvement.