Virtualization: A 'migration' towards 'Green'

BANGALORE, INDIA: While enterprises have largely grown to realize and acknowledge the importance of virtualization technologies – it is surprising that only 4-5 per cent of servers are virtualized and almost 90 per cent of the market lies untapped.

Green and virtualization

Companies today are investing huge sums of money to meet their fast expanding datacenter requirements. A fact little known however, is that a server typically utilizes only a mere 15 per cent of its full capacity. Each operating system or application requires a dedicated server for it to be run - as a result of which, companies end up deploying multiple servers to support multiple applications.

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While, all resources of the server may be occasionally required to run the application - for the majority of time, the server remains unutilized when its application is not under use and keeps guzzling precious power.

As a result, companies end up footing enormous electricity bills for running these power intensive servers, leading to immense wastage of resources. This is where virtualization steps in.

Virtualization enables Green IT in the three ways:

Reduced wastage and recycling costs: Virtualization creates multiple virtual servers on a single hardware machine, allowing multiple users to access applications from the same platform.

As a result, virtualization helps drastically reduce the number of software and hardware resources being deployed by an organization, thereby cutting down wastage and costs of recycling physical computing equipment.

Efficient use of power: By creating several virtual machines on one physical server, virtualization brings down the cost of running multiple hardware machines and significantly helps save precious power resources.

Less requirement of physical space: Cutting down the number of hardware resources - enterprises using virtualization require less amount of physical space for storing physical machines, thereby saving them from making expensive real estate investments.

Virtualization environment can be setup to consolidate loads to dedicated servers under off hours and manage the whole environment dynamically which positively impacts on cost reduction.

Challenges in virtualization

One of the biggest challenges that CIOs face today is the pressure on reducing operating expenditures and minimizing costs. While enterprises have largely grown to realize and acknowledge the importance of virtualization technologies, it is surprising that only 4-5 per cent of servers are virtualized and almost 90 per cent of the market lies untapped. Though there is adequate knowledge on the benefits of virtualization, direction in terms of actual implementation in scenarios is something the market lacks.

As most enterprises work in heterogeneous environments (where they work across platforms and applications offered by different vendors), manageability of physical and virtual environments is a crucial element, which can be rather complex and difficult if not performed end-to-end.

Proper management is essential to ensure that the potential complexities of deploying a virtualized environment are not outweighed by the benefits. As stated by virtualization guru Thomas Bittman “Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place"!

Microsoft understands that while customers are eager to understand and capitalize on virtualization, they often find they are difficult to implement and sustain without the appropriate management tools.

Microsoft hence offers comprehensive virtualization management offerings from the datacenter to the desktop, to help customers take full advantage of these technology advancements.

While most customers acknowledge the benefits of virtualization, CIOs today seek guidance and support in understanding the actual implementation of this technology. It is important for CIOs to have a holistic view of how virtualization can impact their businesses.

Moreover, it has been observed that there is a constant dilemma amongst customers around getting a view of the ROI involved in adopting virtualization solutions available in the market today.

With the objective of making virtualization a reality for customers, Microsoft has introduced a third party virtualization ROI calculation tool to help them understand the total cost advantage that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions deliver.

We also offer virtualization solution accelerators to help customers effectively adopt this technology.

Data Migration in virtualization:

Security within a Virtual Machine is no different from how you’d address any other physical system.

In order for a virtualization role to be installed apart from the processor support for virtualization extension instructions, it strictly requires Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to be enabled at the processor level. This ensures that no code can be executed from a data page. This being one of the widely known attack surface.

Virtualization software automatically isolates each Virtual Machine Instance from each other, giving them a secure environment to run.

Microsoft provides guidelines to secure the virtualized environment in Hyper-V Security Guide, which includes tightening the Root Partition Security; isolating the Root Partition network and network card for Virtual Machines. Securing the Virtual Hard Disks (by default these resources are protected at file system level by ACLs).

For data migration into virtualization environment, there are several tools provided like converting a Physical System to a Virtual Machine to achieve quick migration. It again depends on the scenario as to what is bulk of data/systems we have in the migration path to virtualized environment.

Adopting virtualization in an enterprise depends on the scenario and it is best if an organization adopts a well defined and phased approach. Different circumstances will dictate some modification to this sequence, but a gradual structured roadmap can guide organizations to effectively employ virtualization in their respective scenarios.

(The author is escalation engineer, platforms team at Microsoft India GTSC)