Portfolio: Virtualization in the IT Department

Executive Summary Report

Education with Virtualization

Virtualization in the IT Department

Cloud computing

If an organisation were to switch their existing IT systems over to a cloud based

environment, how would they go about achieving this?

· What should be in the checklist?

· Consider the systems and software that may need replacing.

· Would there be any cost benefits? Discuss.

“Virtualization is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and agility.”

What is Virtualisation

“Here’s a non-technical analogy to help you think about virtualization. Some experts have likened virtualization to an apartment building. Individual apartments share a building. They are each isolated, but they share utilities in a more efficient model than a house might.”

Virtualization is running multiple operating systems on a single machine. Normally computers only have a single operating system installed, virtualization software allows that single computer to host several operating systems at the same time.

Virtualization makes it possible for IT to manage businesses and be more responsive to their internal and external customers, virtualisation allows IT to provide higher-quality services and respond quickly to events, whether it’s a business disruption or market opportunity.

What is Virtualization Computing?

Virtualization, in computing, refers to creating a virtual version of something, including but not limited to a virtual computer hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or computer network resources.

Hardware virtualization

Hardware virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that behaves like a physical computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines is defined by their underlying hardware resources. For example, a physical computer running Microsoft Windows may host a virtual machine that performs like an operating system and is restricted only by the physical machines resources, e.g. the amount of memory it can use safely without causing problems to its hosts requirements.

In hardware virtualization, the host machine is the actual machine on which the virtualization takes place, and the guest machine is the virtual machine. The words host and guest are used to distinguish the software that runs on the physical machine from the software that runs on the virtual machine. The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called a hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager. (Virtualization, 2015)

Types of Virtualization

Currently, most of the activity in the virtualization world focuses on server virtualization —– the data centers or server farms. The two types of server virtualization I will address are:

Operating system virtualization (aka containers): Creates self-contained representations of underlying operating system in order to provide applications in isolated environments. Each self-contained environment (container) reflects the underlying operating system.

Hardware emulation: Represents a computer hardware environment in software so that multiple operating systems can be installed on a single computer. (Wiki, 2015)

There are basically two types of hypervisors:

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the hardware platform and thus achieve higher efficiency.

Type 2 hypervisors run on the host operating system. They are often used when a broad range of I/O devices needs to be supported. (Dummies.com, 2015)

Major Players and Products in Virtualization

Virtualisation products can be aquired from many various providers such as VMWare, Oracle,Citrix and Microsoft, products are made readily available and are usually purchased with initial needs in mind for example if it is needed for Consumer grade needs which require only a small network service for small businesses or Enterprise needswhich would use extensive features and recommended requirememnts. Below is a list of a few welll known major players and their products in virtualization.

· VMware: Provides hardware emulation virtualization products called VMware Server and ESX Server.

· Xen: Provides a paravirtualization solution. Xen comes bundled with most Linux distributions.

· XenSource: The commercial sponsor of Xen. Provides products that are commercial extensions of Xen focused on Windows virtualization. XenSource was recently acquired by Citrix.

· OpenVZ: An open source product providing operating system virtualization. Available for both Windows and Linux

· SWsoft: The commercial sponsor of OpenVZ. Provides commercial version of OpenVZ called Virtuozzo.

· OpenSolaris: The open source version of Sun’s Solaris operating system provides operating system virtualization and will also provide Xen support in an upcoming release. (Golden B, 2015)

Virtualization illustrated in a company model

This is an illustration of virtualization in a company and shows the hierarchy of the different aspects of virtualization that a business uses.

Company virtualises the management layer, which offers cloud grade speed and agility to enterprise management by decoupling existing management tools from the underlying server infrastructure.

How is this virtualization affecting the utilization of IT

“Virtualization can offer amazing reductions in total cost of ownership.”

Virtualization reduces the number of servers you have to run, which means savings on hardware costs and also on the total amount of energy needed to run hardware and provide cooling.

Virtualization is a green technology through and through. Energy savings brought on by widespread adoption of virtualization technologies would negate the need to build so many power plants and would thus conserve our earth’s energy resources.

It reduces system administration work, with virtualization in place, system administrators would not have to support so many machines and could then move from firefighting to more strategic administration tasks.

It gets better use from hardware, virtualization enables higher utilization rates of hardware because each server supports enough virtual machines to increase its utilization from the typical 15% to as much as 80%.

It makes software installation easier, with software vendors tending more and more towards delivering their products preinstalled in virtual machines, much of the traditional installation and configuration work associated with software will disappear. (Dummies.org, 2015)

How is virtualization changing the management approach to IT?

Traditional approaches to infrastructure operations management are incapable of keeping pace with the dynamic nature of today’s virtual environments. In an effort to avoid performance degradation and downtime, IT organizations are relying on IT management tools to monitor the environment and alert administrators to out of policy conditions. Unfortunately the usefulness of such tools in today’s virtual data center, where there are greater interdependencies between systems, and the rate of change with respect to workload requirements is difficult to predict and is limited. (vmturbo.com, 2015) Virtualization introduced three new challenges to the IT department, reorganizing IT taskforces, recognizing new security vulnerabilities, and working with a complex change management process. Server virtualization projects have reduced data center footprints, decreased power and cooling costs and consolidated workloads onto fewer physical servers. Before server virtualization, large IT departments were segmented and distinct, consisting of the server administrators, the storage guys, the network engineers, and the security team. Once a business adopts server virtualization, these boundaries become obsolete because server administrators who manage the virtualization servers now talk to the network engineers about VLANs (virtual LANs). 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. (Tech Target.com, 2015)

Case Study Future of Virtualization Management

Barb Goldworm, President & Chief Analyst for FOCUS

Virtualization management challenges management of both physical and virtual.

Goldworm sees the future of virtualization management as a shift away from device management and move towards user and service management. There’s a lot of integration in the vision she shared and certainly in the Virtualization Management framework she has expressed through her diagram. FOCUS points on virtualization management from which stems a fast-growing ecosystem consisting of hypervisor vendors, virtualization management and traditional management, she doesn’t stop at performance management but also extends into capacity management, fault management, etc,

Virtualisation management framework (Goldburn, B, 2009)

“We have to be good at helping our customers manage new and emerging technologies. We do this by designing modular solutions that address all the piece-parts of the problems new technologies bring. Customers look to us for an integrated architecture that allows them to manage across everything and transition from physical to increasingly virtualized infrastructure. We’re going through a natural maturation process. We saw it when the Web first came out as well. Eventually it will be and should be about managing the broader data center. “(Goldworm, B, 2009)

In “Virtualization management”, you should be reducing operational costs and use complete automation on the infrastructure part to free up time for the company to spend against the higher-level functions and processes.

“Virtualization offers more levers than with a purely physical infrastructure. “

FOCUS have made a conscious choice to focus on managing the virtual. Many orgs ask themselves, “how do we fit virtual into our existing processes?” That’s okay as a first step but they really need to get to “how do we change processes to accommodate the unique possibilities opened up by virtualization”? FOCUS stated that management is the killer app, their answer to this statement, they grouped management to reduce friction. They were adamant that they were going to see a revolution over the next 10 years as they learnt how to take advantage of the virtualisation technology they had access to.

“Virtualization is the enabler but is not a market by itself; rather the market is data center management, and virtualization management is a part of that. “

The message from FOCUS customers was about the need for a “holistic solution”, a cohesive view of data center management.

“Please don’t do point solutions. Don’t separate the physical from the virtual or the hypervisor from the system.” (sciencelogic.com, 2009)

The users didnt want individual/point solutions but instead wanted a dashboard across all of them, CIOs began to recognize and talk about internal IT as private clouds and also beginning to augment internal IT with on-demand public cloud resources. Managing this as well as managing automation, and enabling self-service is what the customers wanted. There is a re-definition going on now in platform management that is focused more on aligning IT with the business outcomes that the CIO wants to achieve.

Virtualization has major implications on infrastructure, but it also drives you to redefine management processes and search for the right tools you need to manage the virtualized environment.