Why choose server virtualization?

Virtualization security fears grow

As people who deal with virtualization every day — you work with it, I write about it — it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that it’s a ubiquitous technology with infinite use cases and unending appeal.

Well, in the words of Lee Corso:

There are still quite a few people out there who don’t feel totally comfortable virtualizing everything. And they’re not all newbies who don’t know what they’re talking about.

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Consolidation ratios are yesterday’s news

Ever notice that when you talk to someone about virtualizating, it always seems to come down to, “So, what’s your consolidation ratio?” Everyone seems to care only about the number of virtual machines you can house on a single host system. While consolidation ratios are important, they’re yesterday’s news!

Virtualization is about so much more than just shrinking the footprint (physical and carbon) of your data center. Think about it: What does virtualization really do for you? It encapsulates your workloads (servers) into a collection of files that are consistent, that are portable, that are uncoupled from hardware, and that can be copied from location to location. Let’s look at each of these benefits individually:

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Virtual desktops: Do your own math

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about universal clients, ubiquitous data access and streamlined image management, but ultimately the question of whether virtual desktops make sense comes down to what IT decisions always come down to: money.

Johnathan,  a Server Virtualization blog reader, recently posted a comment on one of my posts detailing the math for a 250-seat virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)/thin-client implementation, which amounted to a $350 per-desktop-capex advantage for VDI; a three-times faster deployment schedule and troubleshooting times that were orders of magnitude faster (albeit harder to quantify). Not too shabby.

Of course, that was before VMware announced new pricing for its re-branded VDI suite, View 3. At $150 per seat for View Enterprise or $250 for View Premier, capex savings would decrease to $300 or $200 per desktop. That’s assuming you pay list price, which is highly doubtful. But it also doesn’t account for the storage capacity savings you might  realize by using View Composer to share desktop images: an average of 70%, according to VMware.

Suffice it to say that assigning ROI dollars to an IT project is a highly personal, subjective affair. And that the numbers posted by others are often suspect, as Bernard Golden points out in his article “Virtualization Projections Deserve Scrutiny.” Here, Golden looks into a Butler Group report that reports client virtualization savings of $159,000 for 1,000 desktops, or $159 per desktop, per year. Come to find out, the $159 savings was in energy costs alone. Who knows what the overall cost of the deployment really was?

At any rate, if you’ve done the math on a VDI implementation, and believe that your numbers bear scrutiny, go ahead and post the numbers in the comments section of our blog.

Some remaining thoughts on VDI

There’s a lot of virtual desktop news these days, and before too much time passes, I want to share some tidbits on VDI that I picked up this week and that had never occurred to me before.

1. VDI can save you money on software licenses. At least, that’s what I hear from Jeff Cunningham, a network administrator at the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at the University of Maryland, who implemented about 70 virtual desktops for faculty, staff and graduate students. For instance, an individual license for the data analysis and statistical software package Stata runs about $700. In contrast, a 10-seat network license costs the university $2,000, for a savings of $5,000, and the budget to deliver interesting software to a greater number of students.
2. Thin clients can withstand a long power outage. Kunal Patel, the IT director at Nina Plastics, whose VDI project I wrote about earlier this week, told me that during a recent power outage, the company’s regular desktops drained their APC battery backups in less than 10 minutes. Their Pano Logic thin clients, on the other hand, stayed on for four hours. In a similar vein,  the University of Maryland’s Cunningham stuck a kilowatt meter on a bank of five Pano devices and a bank of five regular desktops and discovered that the Pano devices consumed one-fourth the power of the regular desktops.
3. Some IT managers are skeptical of thin clients’ supposed cost advantages. As an example, check out Basilm’s comments on the Server Virtualization Blog. What about you, dear Server Virtualization Blog readers? Have you done the math on VDI and thin clients? What’s the verdict?
4. Big companies need big security. With their strong security and compliance needs, verticals like finance, health care and government are a natural fit for VDI. But in order for them to adopt it, the VDI community needs to support biometric authentication mechanisms, such as fingerprint readers and face recognition software.

That’s all for now, folks. Brace yourself for a lot of news on virtual desktops. Things are about to get interesting

Server virtualization in the age of mergers and acquisitions

Last week at VMworld ’08, while living in the glitz of Vegas for a week of product news, press releases, interviews and judging the Best of VMworld entires with my TechTarget colleagues, my constantly buzzing BlackBerry delivered the latest financial news — the collapse of Lehman, the fall of Morgan, the implosion of AIG — all saying the doom of the market is upon thee.

As an investor, this wasn’t my happiest week (I always felt it was odd to invest money in people who invest money), but for a lot of others, last week must have been miserable indeed. Among those who are feeling miserable right now are IT staffers at Bank of America, who must now acquire a global IT infrastructure as their company acquires Morgan Stanley. And of course, federal IT staff are now worrying about how to oversee the essentially nationalized AIG. That’s not to mention the IT teams at numerous other companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions.

This is the time for server virtualization to shine. Bank of America should lead the charge in making efficient use of virtualization in their acquisition of Morgan Stanley. BofA is going to inherit an immense quantity of hardware, not to mention enormous heating/cooling/electric bills, colossal real estate costs and a titanic regulatory compliance project as it tries to integrate its own IT infrastructure with Morgan’s. If BofA (or any acquiring company for that matter) is smart, it will use virtualization to physical-to-virtual (P2V) every possible asset, transport to its own data center and import those virtual systems.

Bank of America shouldn’t just P2V low-hanging fruit, either — it should reach for the stars. Then it should shut down that physical hardware, wipe it and sell it to help offset the project costs. There are obviously a lot of nuanced steps involved in making this happen, but all the major pain points to which virtualization presents solutions are all the major pain points in integrating a new IT infrastructure:

1) Server move/change/add/remove
2) Power costs
3) Real estate costs
4) Heating and cooling
5) Configuration management
6) Asset management

The difference between the slow-rolling projects in most companies and the aggressive plan I recommend is night and day. The ROI in a progressive rollout can be achieved over time, integrated into the budget and then applied over that time. The costs of an acquisition and the integration of that acquisition’s IT assets are immediate and immense.

Virtualization can provide those long-term benefits in the short term — the elimination of real estate, cooling and power costs alone will offset the cost of licensing and storage. The enhanced backup and retention possible with virtualized systems will go a long way towards easing regulatory concerns of data retention.

CiRBA analysis tool compares Hyper-V and VMware

If you are thinking about Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization but aren’t sure how it will fare against VMware in your data center, a new tool from Toronto, Ontario-based CiRBA Inc. might help.

This week, CiRBA announced the availability of packaged analysis templates that compare Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V versus VMware-based virtualization.

Using CiRBA’s analysis, data centers can examine the suitability of each hypervisor for a given environment, see consolidation ratios, long-term management considerations and financial returns from each platform.

CiRBA’s analysis templates for Hyper-V and VMware-based virtualization are driven by specialized Rulesets for each platform in combination with utilization analysis.

The new comparative analysis templates for Hyper-V and VMware essentially provide a vendor-agnostic analysis, data, and organization-specific business and technical constraints to determine the best option for any given environment. Examples of comparison points between the two competitor products include:

*Per-guest resource limits: Hyper-V and VMware offer different per-guest maximum resource configurations, meaning the number of virtual CPUs, memory and network interfaces supported, which could impact compatibility.

*Memory over commit: Hyper-V and VMware differ in their ability to share memory between VMs, making efficiency gains through “over-commitment.” This differentiating factor can impact consolidation ratios and infrastructure design.

*Workload mobility: The two technologies differ in their support for the live migration of workloads between physical servers. Hyper-V doesn’t offer live migration yet, VMware does (VMotion).

CiRBA customers can access these new analysis features through CiRBA Central, a central repository of analysis rules that allows organizations to stay up to date on the latest best practices in data center optimization. CiRBA Powered Partners will also have access to these rules in order to help guide their clients through the selection of optimal technology for their environment.

For more information on CiRBA’s comparative analysis for Hyper-V versus VMware, contact the company.

VMware entering final phase of virtualization evolution: Cloud computing

As new vendors enter the x86 virtualization space, pioneer VMware, Inc. is moving on to the next frontier, cloud computing, said VMware President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene in her keynote address at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston on May 21.

“The dream of cloud computing is fast becoming reality,” she said.

With cloud computing, workloads are assigned to connections, software and services, which are accessed over a network of servers and connections in various locations, collectively known as “the cloud.” Using a thin client or other access point, like an iPhone or laptop, users can access the cloud for resources on demand.

Greene told the event attendees that the evolution of virtualization begins with users deploying VMs for testing and development, then easing into server consolidations for production environments. The third phase is resource aggregation, with entire data centers being virtualized, followed by automation of all of those aggregated workloads. The final “liberation” phase is cloud computing, Greene said.

“We now have competition going after the first two phases of virtualization evolution with 1.0 products, but we are very much in the aggregate, automate and liberate phase,” Greene said.

Other vendors have their sights set on cloud computing as well. IBM Corp. and Google announced plans to promote cloud computing in October by investing over $20 million in the hardware, software and services at universities, and Reuters reported this week that Microsoft expects companies will abandon their own in-house computer systems and shift to cloud computing as a less expensive alternative.

While VMware moves towards cloud computing, the company is in the thick of the automation phase and has released a number of virtualization automation products recently, including VMware Site Recovery Manager for Disaster Recovery, VMware Stage Manager and VMware Lifecycle Manager for lifecycle management and VMware Lab Manager, as well as product and service bundles.

The company is also focusing on desktop virtualization with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and has introduced services and products to move that inititive forward.

“Desktop virtualization does require a major change in the infrastructure, so it could be 2011 before we see desktop virtualization adoption in the millions. We do have hosted desktop virtualization customers with large deployments…but [adoption] will happen at a measured pace,” Greene said. “I do think someday everyone’s desktop will run in a virtual machine, whether it be on PCs or MACs, thin clients or phones. With the advantages from a security, manageability and flexibility standpoint, it will become mainstream.”

The cost of desktop virtualization is a barrier to adoption, but Greene said the price per user of desktop virtualization will come down steadily over the next few years. It is in the $800 per user range today, she said.

Virtualization tools, advice focus on ROI

The decision whether to adopt virtualization often comes down to the corporate bottom line. CFOs want to know how long it will be before they see return on investment from virtualization, and there are many considerations in determining ROI.

Yesterday, I spoke with Stephen Fink, senior infrastructure architect for the global IT consultancy Avanade, about a comprehensive tool he created that takes just about every inch of data centers under consideration to determine what the ROI for virtualization will be.

Fink has 14 years of experience as a consultant and created the virtualization model for ROI as a tool for his own clients, but it made its way around the company and is now used as the way to determine ROI by Avande consultants, he said.

There are 125 inputs in the Microsoft Excel-based tool - such as power and cooling, cabling, network, CPU, servers, floor space, and staffing costs - and each helps determine the impact of implementing virtualization at a customer’s location, he said.

“There will never be a one-size-fits-all solution, and there has to be a business case for virtualization; I look at their environment from a high-level approach and asses the inventory. We look at their apps, their network, the annual power costs, licensing costs for software, etc., to see what they pay for their environment, and we can now give a really good idea of the ROI with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware,” Fink said.

Avande, which is partially owned by Microsoft, has the benchmark information on Hyper-V from the most recent release candidates and uses that to determine Hyper-V ROI. Hyper-V is scheduled for release in August.

“We look at the net costs of the environment without virtualization versus what they would pay if they virtualized, with specific server types, running ESX or Hyper-V. We can tell you how many systems can be virtualized, and you can see the cost of your virtual servers, the cost per OS and the cost of your virtual hosts, to determine your annual cost reduction from virtualized guests,” Fink explained.

Fink said consultants like him are often used to determine whether virtualization is worth the initial acquisition and licensing costs, which depends on businesses’ expectations when it comes to ROI. “If a company already operates efficiently and has a portfolio of apps that make them a poor candidate for virtualization - like very high CPU and high memory consuming apps or data base severs, virtualization may not be the answer for them,” Fink said.

Avanade uses the tool as part of its consultancy, and it is only available through Avande consultants - which, of course, comes at a cost to businesses.

Other virtualization calculator tools are available for free, like the one from VMware, but these aren’t as precise as Fink’s tool from what I can tell.

There are also plenty of experts offering advice on determining virtualization ROI that won’t cost you anything.

According to IT security and virtualization technology analyst Alessandro Perilli , to calculate ROI, “you need to apply simple math to the costs your company could mitigate or eliminate by adopting virtualization.”

He reported that virtualization can reduce some of the following direct costs:

* Cost of space (leased or owned) for physical servers
* Energy to power physical servers
* Air conditioning to cool the server room
* Hardware cost of physical servers
* Hardware cost of networking devices (including expensive gears like switches and fibre channel host bus adapters)
* Software cost for operating system licenses
* Annual support contracts costs for purchased hardware and software
* Hardware parts for expected failures
* Downtime cost for expected hardware failures
* Service hours of maintenance cost for every physical server and networking device

Scott Feuless, a senior consultant with Compass, based in Texas, wrote about how to quantify virtualization ROI recently, and IT consultant John Hayes of Avnet Technology Solutions also had some advice on figuring out the cost of virtualization that could help make the case for virtualization.

Saving money by using virtualization

As part of a business case to justify our server consolidation/virtualization project, I had to show the benefits of what the project would provide. Virtualization provides a lot of “soft” benefits like reduced administration, maintenance costs, head count, etc. but one of the “hard” benefits is from the reduced power and cooling costs. I put together a little spreadsheet of all my servers and the wattage of their power supplies to help calculate how much money we would save in that area. The end result was real numbers I could take to management to show them the ROI that virtualization provided.

In today’s world the cost of just about everything has been on the rise. Fuel costs in particular have a ripple effect on just about everything we buy which also affects computers. That’s why virtualization is a great way to offset those increased costs. Providing power and cooling to a data center can be a very big expense, virtualizing servers can dramatically reduce this cost. PlateSpin provides a nice power savings calculator on their website. If we plug in the following numbers:

• 200 physical servers
• average usage of 750 watts per server
• average processor utilization of 10% before virtualization
• target processor utilization of 60% after virtualization

The average power and cooling savings a year comes out to $219,000 with a consolidation ratio of 5:1 based on a cost per kilowatt hour of 10 cents. As the cost of power increases the savings become even greater, at 12 cents the cost savings become $262,800 per year and at 15 cents the cost savings become $328,500 per year.

Of course savings will vary based on a number of factors including how well utilized your physical servers are before virtualization, your consolidation ratio which can sometimes be as high as 15:1 and also your location. Different parts of the country average different costs per kilowatt hour, California and New York tend to be the highest at 12 - 15 cents per kilowatt hour where Idaho and Wyoming are the cheapest at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Power costs tend to rise a lot more then they go down so the argument for virtualization from a cost perspective becomes much easier when you factor in the potential savings.

Some power companies like PG&E even offer incentives and rebates for virtualizing your data center and reducing power consumption. A greener data center benefits everyone and besides reducing costs also helps the environment. Virtualization is one of the key technology’s to help make this possible.

Dilbert gets orders to virtualize!

Scott Adams isn’t the first to create a cartoon about virtualization (see VirtualMan helps IT pros explain virtualization’s benefits). Even so, his short comics that grace yesterday and today’s Dilbert.com homepage highlight a simple truth: for IT managers, getting the green light to virtualize is a lot easier if the higher ups have the idea first. Here’s a thought: If you want to virtualize, and your C-levels aren’t quite paying attention, maybe you should put a virtualization insert in one of his (or her) trade journals?

Yesterday’s Dilbert.com comic strip:

But, as today’s comic points out, even if your company approves a virtualization project, you still may not get to partake in the fun!