Virtualization Strategy for Mid-Sized Businesses - Assignment Example

?VIRTUALIZATION STRATEGIES FOR MID-SIZED BUSINESSES Virtualization Strategies for Mid-sized Businesses Affiliation Table of Contents Introduction 2 Essence and Benefits of Virtualization 4 Virtualizations for Business 6 Making a virtualization strategy 9 Planning 10 Determining the virtualization requirements 10 Analysis 11 Implementation of Virtualization 11 Executive Summary 12 References 13 Introduction Nowadays, businesses are more and more having a propensity towards the idea of virtualization to move or re-establish server, network and storage resources based on their business preferences. Additionally, the business continuity requires cautious planning for down time for maintenance or upgrades, dealing with the system related problems that may turn out to be the cause for temporary service disturbance and business application downtime. With the purpose of dealing with such kind of challenges, virtualization guarantees performance optimization by assigning the exact resources for instance, cache, CPU, throughput, bandwidth and server, storage I/O and network to the selected application according to the workload demands and business priorities. Moreover, it also guarantees high availability and reduction in response time by offering instantaneous failover and revival of the business application to its usual operation (Mikkilineni & Kankanhalli, 2010) Virtualization is the formation of a virtual (instead of genuine) version of an application or device, such as a server, an operating system, a storage device or network resources. Additionally, the virtualization is rising rapidly and holds close a number of technologies at differing phases of development, for instance, OS virtualization, virtual containers, and streaming. Despite the fact that it is inflexible to understand the critical vision, thus to virtualize the businesses, companies need to look at the capabilities they have or virtualization technologies exist in the market and choose those that provide them with instant benefits at the same time as helping the them to go in the right way (Dunlop, 2009; Drake, 2009) Virtualization would be helpful to the companies to take advantages of two or more virtual computing architectures, with different operating systems and applications on one of hardware virtually and cost-effectively. In view of the fact that, virtualization basically reduces the coupling between users, operating systems, and applications from the definite hardware features of the systems they use to carry out computational tasks. Additionally, this technology guarantees to go together with in an entirely new wave of software and hardware modernization and also offer simplifying system upgrades and in some cases may eliminate the need for such upgrades (Golden & Scheffy, 2008). Essence and Benefits of Virtualization Virtualization strategies can be helpful for mid-sized businesses in optimizing their resource utilization. According to (Microsoft Corporation, 2006; Powell, 2009), businesses are adopting the virtualization strategies to assemble the resources of the infrastructure which may enable the business to efficiently manage workload operations. Thus, it results in the reduction of costs. Virtualization strategies may improve the business efficiency by promising a reducing the number of failures in operations of business, reduction in the downtime of resources and planning for recovery from failures which may ensure increased availability of the resources owned by a business. In addition to operation, virtualization strategies allow mid-sized businesses to ensure the authorized and optimized usage of their resources by the enforcement of service level agreements. It may enable the dynamic allocation of resources, ultimately increasing the business agility. There are several technologies that ensure the realization of virtualization. According to (Singh, 2009), virtual machine (VM) is the most common technology that can be adopted or used to recognize the virtualization of resources for any business and promises many advantages. Virtual machines can be utilized to unite the capacity of numerous under-utilized servers to fewer machines, probably a single machine. In this way, it is very helpful for savings on hardware, management, environmental costs and management of the server infrastructure. Also, Virtual machines can help in the formation of an optimal resource utilization strategy as it this technology allows to create operating systems, or execution framework with the likelihood to identify restrictions on resource utilization in relation to some utilizations strategy, and certain the right schedulers, resource guarantees. This may increase the throughput of the resources owned by the business and will also ensure quality of service. Moreover, such types of operating systems are also good at providing the quality of service. In order to monitor and evaluate the performance of business applications owned by a business, Virtual machines allow for powerful debugging and performance monitoring. Mid-sized businesses that do not find themselves to acquire powerful resources can attain advantages through virtualization and virtual machines provide a great help for that. Virtual machines also offer the illusion of such hardware configuration that business does not currently own such as multiprocessors. Business applications owned by businesses are usually designed as composition of different services. These services are developed on different platform (e.g. language, operating system), but for the successful execution of business application, these services must interoperate with each other, virtualization through virtual machines provide such a facility also to make business application platform independent so it may run on any operating system. It may also allow easier integration or merger of businesses applications Virtualization can ensure the quality of service provided by a mid- sized business as virtual machines can effectively generate arbitrary test scenarios, and can lead to some very imaginative, effectual quality assurance for certain business situations. During its execution a business application for a business may suffer from certain failures causing business operation to get stuck for a certain period of time. Virtualization addresses this fact as it may to help create a lot of useful activities such as system migration, backup, and recovery easier and more manageable. It may improve the operation of business by reducing business application’s downtime. Virtualizations for Business According to (Murphy, 2010), in order to consolidate their resources, business can choose to adopt several kinds of virtualizations. Operating System Virtualization, Generally, this is the form of virtualization that is applied by the most of the businesses. In this regard, the virtual machines are generally full implementations of standard operating systems, for example Windows Vista or RedHat Enterprise Linux, running at the same time on the same physical hardware. In addition to this, new trend in such kind of virtualization is shifted towards breaking the physical relationship between an operating system and its native hardware, in order to evolve this paradigm into the data center. It may provide flexibility by reducing the coupling between the business applications and virtualized computing node at which it will be executed. Also, there will be no need to have separate machines for the execution of different applications, composing the business’s IT infrastructure. Thus, operating system virtualization by a business may turn out to be the most significant driving force for the companies to bring the benefits of virtual machines and to reduce the number of physical machines thus reducing complexity in operations. This trend eventually decreases the expenditures by saving companies money on hardware, rack space, co-location fees, power, cable management, and more (Murphy, 2010). It may also be beneficial for the mid-sized businesses, who doesn’t have enough capital to manage separate servers to utilize them for their application, to virtualize the application servers. It may also be helpful in balancing if any particular server is over loaded, so some other server having less work load can be utilized. They most important benefit that application server virtualization can provide to a mid-sized business is that it may provides access to many different application services transparently. It is usually done through virtual equipment, called reverse proxy load balancer, which facilitates the hosting of a virtual interface easy to get to the end user on the front end. On the other hand, the reverse proxy will load balance a number of different servers and applications such as a web server (Murphy, 2010). Management, managing a business also needs to be virtualized by extending the virtualization strategy to include administration roles, which is where administration or management becomes virtual. Additionally, certain operating system also provide policies in order to virualize the privileges and authorities of the management roles e.g. those offered by the Microsoft Windows XP, 2003, and Vista. Moreover, the management virtualization is also a major issue in data center management that actually manages the virtualized resources of the business. Thus, it is essential for the network administrators to have full access to all the infrastructure equipments, for instance switches and core routers; on the other hand they do not have admin-level access to servers. In this typical scenario, user or group policies provided by certain operating systems such as Windows Server, may help a lot (Murphy, 2010). Now days, organizations mostly have an established network facilitating the exchange of information and resources between different departments. So it is highly important to apply network virtualization in order to completely vitualize a business. For this purpose, it is possible to define a single Ethernet port can be used to maintain specifically virtual connections using multiple IP addresses and networks. Virtual LAN tags are also used to virtually segment these networks. In this way virtualization of network offers an interface with the ability to bring up routing services dynamically for the network of one business without interrupting other services on the same interface (Murphy, 2010) A mid-sized business usually owns a number of hardware devices in order to make its IT infrastructure able to operate and to perform its operations successfully. So, businesses also find it necessary to apply hardware virtualization. Hardware virtualization divides the locations of physical hardware into self-governing components and deals with those self-governing components as separate, individual components, providing better management of hardware resources owned by a business. Asymmetric and symmetric multiprocessing are instances of hardware virtualization and in both these types of hardware virtualization, the application or service requesting computing node is not aware about at which specific application server this application or service is going to execute. Following the virtualization strategy, application or service just sends a request for the allocation of server for execution it is the responsibility of the load balancer (reverse proxy load balancer provided by operating system virtualization) to assign a server to the application. Regardless of the nature whether it is symmetric and asymmetric, hardware virtualization allows the business application of a particular business to use the hardware that the organization doesn’t truly own. Moreover, for proper virtual service provisioning, dynamic resource allotment is significant for the reason that it offers absolute hardware management and control for resources as required, virtual resources can be assigned as long as hardware resources are still available (Murphy, 2010). Service virtualization is basically about the assembling of all of the above discussed types of virtualizations into one package, in order to completely virtualize a business. In addition to this, the service virtualization composes all of the elements used in providing a business application over the network, and it also provide a way to unite all components of a business application regardless of where those components actually be located in. This is the basic reason of using service virtualization as an enabler for application availability and interoperability between different businesses and business applications as well. The strategy for service virtualization encompasses the integration of strategies formed for the virtualization of application server where the actual business logic for the business application will reside, the underlying architecture that will manage service and data accessibility between each piece such as SOA, the virtualization of data base server, the network that will enable the flow of information within the organization conducting the business and a storage network that will store application data. In the scenario of a mid-sized business, service virtualization may facilitate each abovementioned component to work separately and be available as it will be required for the entire application to work appropriately. For extraordinary circumstances, the service virtualization for a business can also provide the mixture of other types of virtualization for instance, for a web application of a business, 15 virtual machine operating systems are used for load-balanced of web server. Moreover, the service virtualization combines all the independent components and distributes them together to the business as a single unit, in the form of a complete application (Murphy, 2010). Making a virtualization strategy Implementing virtualization without making a strategy is similar to building a house without a map. Thus, to achieve the benefits of virtualized infrastructure technologies, there is dire need for a strategy to direct decisions and actions that are essential infrastructure investments for virtualization of a medium sized business. However, there are a lot of virtualization technology infrastructures which can be chosen to think about when implementing virtualization; there architectures include business application, operating system, hardware and the management of these aspects. On the other hand, certain degree of risk is also involved in this implementation such as diverse virtualizations are not fitting together, and the outcomes being less than best and cost effective. In this scenario, taking an action in accordance to a virtualization strategy, addresses these risks (Microsoft Corporation, 2006). According to (Bulmer, 2010), formation of a virtualization strategy requires the consideration of certain factors and involves the following steps: Planning In this phase, management of the businesses, who wants to take on or implement the virtualization, must try to recognize that why they essentially need virtualization. They need to analyze their needs in the following directions (Powell, 2009; Bulmer, 2010): Which IT assets are currently in use? And which capacity planning tools can help address this question and provide useful insight; it may be helpful for assessing the requirements for establishment of the data center. How to manage that data center and the virtual machines that have been introduced to realize virtualization. Who will be the ultimate owner of the virtualized resources? This can be decided through an agreed contract. By assigning ownership to one person, an integrated approach is fostered more easily. How to gain the specialized knowledge to get full advantage of virtualization? Vendor and other third-party services provide skilled expertise when IT staff for some particular business has limited experience. Determining the virtualization requirements Although a business may be using a number of resources during its normal operation but a successful virtualization requires the determination of optimal resource that whose virtualization will provide the business with the maximum benefit. It must be analyzed to decide that whether the virtualization of these business aspects will provide the business with long-term benefits or it will be an investment for just temporary advantages. If it is not determined before actually implementing the virtualization then it may result in drastic performance degradation causing the business to suffer great losses (Bulmer, 2010; Powell, 2009). Analysis In order to ensure that the business will be shifted smoothly from a traditional to virtualized environment and an efficient use of IT resources, the existing computing environment should be analyzed. It may be good to conduct the traffic analysis over long periods as it will provide with the important information about the utilization of resources such as which servers are used the most, and when the peak timing starts for and network traffic occur. In addition, it will provide us with sufficient knowledge about making a resource utilization strategy such that low-use servers can be merged into a single physical server without damaging the processing or storage capabilities of one machine. Moreover, the servers that are to be likely to peak at different times can be integrated to balance the traffic load. In this scenario, the managers must be skilled to decide that which physical servers should be kept, and which should stop working. Once the physical equipment needs are analyzed, the layout of the data center, enabling virtualization, can be designed. It is strongly needed to take into account all the necessary features of each component (operating system, hardware, network etc.) to in order attain every possible advantage of virtualization.(Bulmer, 2010; Powell, 2009). Implementation of Virtualization After the creation of virtualization plan and determining all the needs, then it is the right time to go for implementation of concept. In this regard, a well-made virtualization strategy is effectual to the company’s everyday operations very minimally. Thus, analysis for such a virtualization strategy will save the company time in the long run as the transition from traditional to virtual environment occurs without any problems (Bulmer, 2010; Powell, 2009). It may be better for the companies to adopt a staged strategy for the realization of major migrations. In this scenario, the movement from some physical servers to virtual environment and evaluation of this change could affect company operations may provide a good insight of the virtualized environment and the anticipated advantages. However, if anticipated advantages are accomplished then it will be suitable to transform a few more servers and so on otherwise getting back to the traditional state will be appropriate. On the other hand, completing this process slowly allows the companies to act in response to unanticipated problems found in earlier stages to allow later stages to proceed more easily (Bulmer, 2010; Powell, 2009). When the migration from traditional to virtualized environment is completed, the performance of the organizations must be analyzed periodically to make certain that virtualized framework still meets the needs of the firm. However, one major advantage of virtualization is as traffic demands growth, more physical equipment can be added to support the virtual architecture. Moreover, the anticipated future changes in traffic to keep the system operating at peak effectiveness (Bulmer, 2010; Powell, 2009). Executive Summary Today, organizations are increasingly adopting a virtualized fashion for their businesses. The main reasons are to better serve the customer by taking advantage of the resources that the organization doesn’t actually own, that are actually the virtualized resources. In order to shift from a traditional to virtualized environment, there are certain aspects that are needed to be virtualized to completely virtualize the business of the respective organization. The aspects to be virtualized may include the operating system for the execution of business application, application server at which the business application may reside, the established network of the organization, the management, the hardware owned by the organization and the services that may ultimately involve the merger of all abovementioned virtualizations. In order to realize the virtualization of the business of any organization, a strategy needs to be formed. Formation of the strategy involves a careful planning about what is to be virtualized, determining the needs of the business, analyzing which business services need to be virtualized , implementation of virtualization and performance evaluation after the virtualization have been implemented in order to find the room for improvements. References Bulmer, S. R. (2010, September 28). How To Create An IT Virtualization Strategy. Retrieved February 08, 2011, from EZineArticles.com: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Create-An-IT-Virtualization-Strategy&id=5114410 Drake, H. (2009, October 13). Virtualization Pro. Retrieved February 09, 2011, from TechTarget.com: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/what-is-virtualization/ Dunlop, J. (2009, September). Developing an Enterprise Client Virtualization Strategy. Retrieved February 09, 2011, from Intel.com: http://www.intel.com/it/pdf/Enterprise-Client-Virtualization-Strategy.pdf Golden, B., & Scheffy, C. (2008). Virtualization For Dummies, Sun and AMD Special Edition. New York: Wiley Publishing, Inc. Microsoft Corporation. (2006, July 14). Virtualization: The Architectural Foundation for Dynamic IT. Retrieved February 09, 2011, from http://www.microsoft.com/business/dsi/virtualization.mspx Mikkilineni, R., & Kankanhalli, G. (10). Using Virtualization to Prepare Your Data Center for "Real-Time Assurance of Business Continuity". 19th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (pp. 76-81). Larissa, Greece: IEEE. Murphy, A. (2010). Virtualization Defined - Eight Different Ways. Retrieved February 08, 2011, from http://www.f5.com/pdf/white-papers/virtualization-defined-wp.pdf Powell, J. (2009, January 09). Q&A: Creating a Virtualization Strategy. Retrieved February 06, 2011, from Enterprise Strategies: http://esj.com/Articles/2009/09/01/Creating-Virtualization-Strategy.aspx?Page=4#, Singh, A. (2009). An Introduction to Virtualization. Retrieved February 09, 2011, from KernelThread.com: http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/ Read More