There are several apprehensions CIOs have when it comes to virtualizing their mission-critical applications. So, what precautions and preparations are necessary? By Jasmine Desai
Godfrey Phillips India is India’s second largest cigarette maker and markets a range of popular brands such as Four Square, Red and White, Jaisalmer, Cavanders and Tipper. As business grew, Godfrey Phillips India was deploying new systems and applications at a rate that threatened to eat into the company’s margins. To sustain growth,Godfrey Phillips India turned to virtualization to meet its requirements. “We were concerned about transitioning enterprise applications, server utilization and the stability of the virtualized platform,” says Rajesh Bawa, Senior Manager, IT Operation and Infrastructures, Godfrey Phillips India. After identifying VMware vSphere, the IT team conducted extensive performance and reliability tests and then began moving its test and development and production environments to the VMware infrastructure.
“We decided to migrate about 30 servers to the virtualized infrastructure in our first phase, including those running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator,” says Bawa. “In the second phase, we shifted across about 20 servers running applications and systems such as Oracle Database, Pentaho open source business intelligence, Oracle WebLogic application server and Oracle E-Business Suite applications.” The company migrated E-Business Suite to the new infrastructure despite the fact Oracle had not certified the product to run on VMware. “As we upgraded our enterprise resource planning system to the latest Oracle release, we moved the entire stack – including development, user acceptance testing, production and Oracle SOA Suite servers – to VMware,” Bawa adds.
Godfrey Phillips India has now achieved capital expenditure savings of Rs.1.3 crore and annual operating expenditure savings of Rs.15 lakh, and cut power consumption, space and management costs by 40%. For its Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 platform, the organization has achieved a 30 % performance improvement, largely due to its ability to allocate processing and memory resources as required. “It was a critical decision for us as email is our primary tool for business communication in the virtualized environment because it would allow us to undertake faster patch management and testing, quicker backup and install multiple levels of redundancy,” says Bawa.
Virtualizing mission-critical application is indeed a ‘critical decision’ mixed with apprehension for most enterprises in spite of being acquainted with its many benefits. Says BS Nagarajan, Director – Systems Engineering – India & SAARC, VMware, “IT is very confident of virtualization and IT owns infrastructure, but it does not own applications, which are owned by business groups.” Thus, businesses have varied concerns and apprehensions, especially around virtualizing mission-critical applications. Questions like, Will the performance get affected? Will the application work in the same way as on physical hardware? How will support from the vendor work? If the application is running fine on physical hardware why should I virtualize? are not uncommon to hear.
Says Santanu Ghose, Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India, “Any issues of downtime or any performance related issue has a very high impact on an organization. Organizations have performance related apprehension. They need dedicated resources with certain CPU etc. but if performance is not guaranteed then they do not want to pursue the course of virtualization.” Other major concerns are centered around licensing, ISV support, etc.
Riding the virtualization wave
A recent Gartner report on Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure mentioned that the majority of Global 1000 enterprises are heavily virtualized, and very few are considering changing their existing virtualization technologies. However, a growing percentage of them have or are planning to have multiple virtualization technology silos, each managed with its own administrative solutions and skills (which may reduce software expense, but which also increases overall operational cost and complexity). Many smaller enterprises and those in emerging economies are still early in their virtualization effort. These enterprises have several viable alternatives from which to choose.
As per Abhijit Potnis, Director- Technology Services, EMC India & SAARC, “The processing power of x86 processor has gone tremendously high. A lot of SAP and Oracle applications are being moved to the virtualized platform. Organizations should look at what infrastructure they have and applications that are ready to move quickly.”
A Forrester report, Server Virtualization Predictions For 2013 by Dave Bartoletti, mentions that the x86 server virtualization infrastructure market is the foundation for two extremely important market trends that relate and overlap: infrastructure modernization and cloud computing. For infrastructure modernization, virtualization is being used to improve resource utilization, reduce costs, improve energy efficiency, improve the speed of resource delivery and encapsulate workload images in a way that enables automation. Virtualization is a horizontal trend in this sense, with the vast majority of enterprises and workloads eventually becoming virtualized.
There is a good amount of transition happening toward virtualization platform and organizations are certainly more open toward virtualizing their core applications. There are customers who are already familiar with it and have virtualized low hanging fruits and there are early adopters that directly virtualize mission- critical applications. As per Nagarajan of VMware, “Organizations can get better performance on an application when virtualized. There are other applications that might get lesser performance, but the difference is so small that organizations do not mind going ahead with it for other benefits they are getting.”
Most critical applications are database intensive and organizations might harbor doubts about their performance in virtual environment. Databases are generally very I/O intensive. The good news is that in 2009-10 the marginal I/Ops that could be delivered through a virtual machine were in the range of a few thousands. The I/Ops that can be delivered today are one million.
The Forrester report by Bartoletti details some important tips and observations on virtualization that can come in handy for CIOs:
The debate around hypervisor features is over, as the major platforms have effectively achieved parity. The most recent versions of Hyper-V, vSphere, and open source variants of KVM and Xen all provide adequate performance and scalability — not just for low-value applications but also for many performance-sensitive ones. That means it’s safe to allow isolated pools of different hypervisors for development and test or for applications optimized for a particular platform, as long as you have the skills and staff to manage multiple hypervisor platforms.
Heterogeneous virtualization is here to stay. We’re past the days when I&O teams could force all applications to be virtualized onto a single primary hypervisor. That’s good news for anyone worried about lock-in. Many I&O organizations have already judged open source hypervisors and Linux virtualization to be good enough, and there are plenty of Linux workloads yet to be virtualized. All the virtualization management vendors — from Citrix, Dell Quest, Microsoft, and VMware to startups like HotLink — support heterogeneous VM management today.
What I&O needs to do about it. More than half of enterprises already use more than one management tool to control their virtual environments. Before you add a new management tool, consider extending what you already have to include management of new or different VM types. Your application and OS choices should determine the best way to virtualize — you can then layer on advanced management for the applications that really need it.
Virtualization, in spite of concerns, is inevitably going to grow among Indian enterprises. By charting a proper roadmap and carefully marshaling technical resources, organizations can indeed maximize their investments in this technology.
