Treat your virtualization project like a data center move
April 9th, 2008 | 
Author: Why is it that migrating to virtual infrastructure (VI) is most often considered to be the responsibility of the server administrators? Anyone who has already done it can tell you it involves much more than servers and hardware. Even for small companies, virtualizing servers potentially (and usually) involves networking, storage, security, and infrastructure services changes. In fact, it is often as involved and complex as moving your physical servers from one data center to another.
So why is there a perception that implementing VI is only a server team responsibility? Obviously, one reason is because on the surface it’s about installing and consolidating operating systems on server hardware. Another reason is because VMware, the source for all the interest in migrating to VI to date, has done such a great job marketing their products as just server installs.
For example, VMware, along with partners (including my company), has conducted numerous Basic Consolidation Estimates (BCE) with Capacity Planner to explain to customers how underutilized their server hardware is and to justify the hardware investment necessary for VI3. Yes, a true capacity analysis for virtualization project covers networking, storage, and services infrastructure, but the BCE is not a true capacity analysis project.
The deliverables of the BCE are a 7 to 10 page .ppt presentation that tells you little more than the number of VI3 Enterprise licenses you’ll need to purchase to achieve an amazing server consolidation ratio. It’s an effective pre-sales tool to shock customers into realizing the savings in hard and soft costs that will be realized by a migration to virtualization. Sure, you can use the BCE results to quote server hardware needed and even guesstimate the appropriate storage requirements, but the BCE does not tell you everything you need to know to migrate your servers.
Don’t get me wrong, I am for BCEs and I think VMware’s marketing and product positioning is brilliant. VMware would not be where it is in today if ESX was not adaptable enough to be a implemented as just a server install and configuration. The VMFS file system, despite all the negative press and opinions lately, enables the server admin to request large chunks of storage from the SAN and then use that storage without any further interaction from the storage team. Virtual switches and port groups allow server admins to request only basic trunking from the networking team. Truly, that’s all that is needed for a “jumpstart” implementation.
What’s missing is the planning and design details for a high performance, tailored virtual infrastructure. That means requiring your engineers across all of your technologies have a responsibility in architecting the virtual solution. Therefore, companies need to treat the virtualization project like a data center move. Make sure the networking, storage, and operations engineers understand virtualization and collaborate. After all, you are moving your servers to a new location. It’s just not a brick and mortar facility.
For more reading about how others are expressing the same opinions (and my motivation for writing this post) check out:
Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks – Colin McNamara
“Last April forty of us, all senior engineers attended VMware Certified Professional training at the same time. The class was mixed up so there was an even distribution of CCIE’s, Systems Experts, and Storage Experts. Needless to say this presented our instructors with some extremely challenging questions, but more importantly it set the stage and created a venue for collaboration between these different practices within our own company.”
How virtualization impacts IT staff, security and change management – Scott Lowe
“Now the server administrators who manage the virtualization servers are talking to the network engineers about VLANs (virtual LANs), 802.1Q trunks, and the native VLAN. The network has been extended inside the virtualization hosts, and now the network group and the server group needs to work much more closely together than in the past.
The storage team is now much more heavily involved in server deployments, as every new virtual server that gets turned up is stored on the storage area network (SAN). And the storage team might even have a more in-depth involvement with networking as the use of IP-based storage –iSCSI, NFS, or FCoE — becomes more prevalent.
As server virtualization invades the data center, teams within the IT organization have to be prepared to work more closely together than they may have in the past.”
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Posted in P2V, capacity analysis, capacity planner, vmetc.com | 
Tags: capacity analysis, design, networking, opinion, P2V, planning, SAN, vi3, virtualization, vmware
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piyush bakshi
