Benefits and risks of migrating physical servers into a virtual environment - Essay Example

? Benefits and risks of migrating physical servers into a virtual environment submittedTable of Contents Abstract 3 Benefits and risks of migrating into a virtual environment 4 Short definition of virtualization 4 The main advantages of server virtualization 4 The value of virtualization 5 How can an organization benefit from Virtualization 6 The main risks of server virtualization 8 Magnification of physical failure 8 Increased complexity in troubleshooting 8 Lack of technical skills 9 Security considerations 9 Control of virtual servers inventory 10 Performance issues 11 Conclusion 11 References 11 Abstract Studies have shown that migrating physical servers to a virtual environment improve utilization, simplify operations, and reduce overhead costs which tend to make business overlook the risks involved. In this essay we will try to analyze both the advantages and the disadvantages of server virtualization in a business environment. Benefits and risks of migrating into a virtual environment Recently, more and more companies consider migrating their IT infrastructure into a virtual environment. Due to a number of advantages, the temptation for doing so is challenging. However, there also exist a number of issues and potential risks in the servers virtualization process that a company has to take seriously into account before considering the possibility of migrating its infrastructure to a virtual sever environment. In the paragraphs that follow, firstly we are going to analyze the main advantages of the virtualization process, and secondly its potential issues and risks. Short definition of virtualization Server Virtualization is a framework, methodology and technique that achieves the segmentation of the computer machine’s physical resources into multiple execution environments (which are called virtual private servers), by applying one or more technologies. It is the method of executing multiple independent virtual operating systems in a physical computer machine. It is a way of “disguising” the physical computer resources, including their number and the identity of the isolated physical servers, processors and operations systems, hiding them from the end users of the “virtual” server. (VMware) The main advantages of server virtualization Server Virtualization technology provides a number of advantages that can be very useful to an IT department and to an organization as a whole. Following, we provide a list of representative IT issues that can take advantage of the benefits of Server Virtualization. Virtual machines can be utilized for consolidating the workload of multiple under-utilized servers into a smaller number of server machines, possibly to only one machine. The associated benefits of this are the economy in hardware infrastructure, environmental cost, in administration and maintenance costs. The need for executing old legacy applications that used to work in server machines with operating systems that have become outdated is absolutely fulfilled by the use of virtual servers. An old application might not be able to execute in a new environment that is running a new operating system. Even if it is possible to run in that server environment, it might under-utilize the server machine, in a way that the consolidation of this server together with others into a virtual server - as already mentioned in the previous paragraph- does make sense. This might not be feasible without the use of virtualization as this kind of applications usually have not been developed in a way that they can co-exist with others in an execution environment. Virtual severs can be used for the creation of operating systems or execution environments with limitations to the usage of physical resources, provided that there exist the suitable routers with guaranteed resource access. Virtual servers can be used for the execution of multiple operating systems simultaneously: different versions or even absolutely different operating systems. Virtual servers provide an easier way for applications debugging and performance monitoring. For instance, debugging and performance monitoring tools can be located on the virtual machine monitor. Elimination of errors can take place in operating systems without interrupting their production operation, or even more complex debugging scenarios can be formed. Virtual servers facilitate the transfer/migration of software from one system to other, possibly to a newer version of the operating system. In that way the mobility of applications between systems is made easier. In addition, virtualization facilitates various procedures of an IT department, such as systems migration, the system backup procedures and the system recovery. The value of virtualization There exist many other reasons for which an organization should consider server virtualization. As an overall benefit, virtualization can lead to an important increase of the utilization and efficiency of an organization’s IT infrastructure. In fact, anyone who makes use of a computer system could potentially benefit from virtualization. Millions of people and thousands of organizations worldwide, including all Fortune 100 organizations, are making use of virtualization solutions for reducing their IT cost and at the same time for increasing the efficiency, reliability and flexibility of their existing IT infrastructure. How can an organization benefit from Virtualization Following we present the immediate benefits that an organization can achieve by virtualizing its physical servers 1. Server Consolidation Infrastructure Optimization: Virtualization makes feasible the important increase of resources utilization by concentrating common infrastructure resources and terminating the traditional “one server per application” model. Old applications that require a dedicated server often only make use of only a small portion of the available server processing power. Therefore, by virtualizing such application servers the overall resource utilization of an IT infrastructure can increase dramatically. 2. Reduction of physical infrastructure cost: With Virtualization, we can reduce the number of servers and the IT hardware related to them at the computer center. This in turn leads to a reduction of the reduction of physical space requirements for the data center room at the organization’s premises, to the reduction of power supply and cooling requirements. 3. Increased flexibility of operations and response: Virtualization offers a new way for IT infrastructure administration and can help the IT administrators in spending less time in executing repetitive processes such as provisioning, parameterization, systems monitoring and maintenance. When everything is consolidated, the systems administrator does not have to physically move from one server to another in order to be able to perform his everyday tasks. In a virtualized environment everything can be performed through a common monitor and common administration tools and procedures. 4. Increased applications availability and improved business continuity: The scheduled system downtime is eliminated and the quick system recovery after unexpected system interruptions is made possible, by providing procedures for secure backup and transfer of virtual environments without any interruption of the system continuity and the application services provided to users. 5. Creation of a more reliable and well-organized environment for the development, testing, rollout and maintenance of IT applications: The fact that, as already mentioned, server virtualization provides the ability to create in an easy and flexible way of a number of “replicates” for each of the production operation environments of the system facilitates the creation of all necessary environments for IT applications development and maintenance. The support of those environments has been an important issue in the past. For each application of the organization that is running in production, the ideal number of different environments is around 4-5 (Development environment for developing new application functions, test environment for pursuing the integration testing of new functions, Preproduction environment for the new functions’ user acceptance test, maintenance/production fixes environments for developing production application error fixes. In the traditional “one server per application” model, often it is not feasible to have all those environments for all the applications of the organization, mainly due to cost limitations in acquiring such a large number of physical servers. The result is that there exist problems in the applications development and maintenance processes that could often deteriorate the quality of application services provided by the IT department to the application end users of the organization. Therefore, servers virtualization can lead to an important improvement of the applications quality of service. The main risks of server virtualization As described in the previous paragraphs, the migration of the physical servers of an organization to a virtual environment has a lot of benefits. However, server virtualization also generates a number of risks that the organizations have to take seriously into account. Those risks are analyzed in the paragraphs that follow. Magnification of physical failure A failure of a virtual server may be less frequent than the failure of one of all the servers that existed before virtualization. However, it still can happen. And it may not happen that rarely. The problem is that when it happens, not some but all the systems of the organization will go down, which means that the consequences of such kind of failure to the organization can be much higher than in the case of one simple server. All the applications will go down, and practically all business operations will probably have to stop until the problem is restored. A possible way to mitigate this risk is to virtualize to more than one physical server, so that you have the option to transfer all production applications to the second server when the first one is down. (Pietroforte) Increased complexity in troubleshooting A virtualization server environment adds one new level of complexity in the IT infrastructure of an organization. Whenever a technical problem occurs, it becomes one step more difficult to find its root, investigate and resolve it. For instance, when a system failure that happens in one of the virtual servers, it may not be clear from the first moment whether it is a problem of the specific virtual server’s application or operation system, or a problem of the virtualization system itself. This fact may mean an extra cost for the organization in terms of Increased downtime while investigating the problem, extra effort of the technical staff, extra fees for having an external technician to investigate the problem. (Pietroforte) In order to minimize the possibility of technical problems, any change that takes place in the configuration environment has to be tested thoroughly in a staging environment in order to ensure that the are not any technical problems caused by this change to any of the virtual servers that reside on the machine. Lack of technical skills One of the key issues concerning the process of virtualization in an organization is the people skills. In order to take fully advantage of the new virtualized environment as well as in order to be capable of mitigation of the technical potential risks that emerge from the new technical infrastructure, it is vital that they are trained and have acquired the skills that are necessary to administer a virtualized system. This may seem as something obvious, however it is often neglected. The upper management of the organizations often tends to focus on the technical aspects of a new system, and take for granted that on-the-job training will be sufficient enough for the technical personnel to be able to manage everything. Unfortunately this is not always possible. Although virtualization is a technology that emerged several years ago, it is just recently that it has become a common practice in the technical world. Virtualized environments may encapsulate the old servers; however there exist a number of technical considerations that are completely new to the technical personnel. If the personnel have not been trained sufficiently, there exist a number of serious risks for the system. Security considerations When a physical IT servers environment is virtualized, a number of new security considerations are introduced and need to be considered by the organization. Each organization has a security policy. However this policy has been created based on the physical servers infrastructure. It is not always easy to adapt it to the new virtual environment. The fact that a number of applications that used to run in isolated server machines now run under a common computer server, poses new security issues. For instance, a number of mission critical applications of the organization, with that contain security sensitive data such as the personnel information, the customer database or the accounting data of the firm, may now reside in the same physical location with the web server that is accessed by everyone who enters the company’s site from internet. Of course this does not mean that a risk of invasion really exists. However in order to ensure that this will never happen, it is necessary to revise and complement the security procedures and tools taking into consideration all the parameters of the new virtual infrastructure. Moreover, Virtual machines provide an environment where it is easier for someone to run unauthorized applications. Another issue is the fact that a number of virtual appliances is offered by numerous vendors on the internet and can be downloaded easily and installed on the virtual server machine. If this is performed by unauthorized people it might jeopardize the security of the system. This security risk is related to the experience of the IT personnel in a virtual environment, as described in a previous paragraph, in order to be able to fully adapt the security policy and procedures of the system to the new virtual environment. Control of virtual servers inventory In a virtualized environment, the control of the computer assets inventory of an organization becomes more complicated. In an environment where new machines (it may be virtual but they still are assets) can be “generated” at any time, if the system administration does not keep track of the machines inventory could resort to a situation where no one knows how many and what kind of servers exist in the system (!). There may be inactive servers that compromise the system performance buy consuming system resources; there may be software licensing issues when the maximum number of licenses of a specific software package has been exceeded. For those reasons it is very important that the administrators of a virtual system keep a detailed and up-to-date inventory of all system hardware and software components. Performance issues The performance behavior of an application that is running in a virtual server is often different than when running in a physical server. For this reason it is sometime difficult to make precise estimations about the resources that the virtualized system requires in order to ensure acceptable performance for all the applications that it hosts. The only way to bypass this problem is to have all applications thoroughly tested in order to identify and resolve performance problems before the final installation of the virtualized environment in production. Conclusion As an overall conclusion, an organization can gain multiple advantages from the virtualization of its physical servers, provided that all the potential risks that this process entails are carefully taken into consideration, and that the necessary measures are taken early enough to be able to forecast and mitigate those risks. In order to do so, the virtualization of a system not be seen by organizations as a simple technical modification of an IT System. It has to be supported by an integrated plan that will include the proper training of the involved personnel and the adaptation of the organization’s procedures processes and policies to the new virtualized environment. References Laurianne Mc Laughlin. “Top ten Virtualization Risks Hiding in Your Company”. CIO Blogs. 12 Feb. 2008. Web. 03 Dec. 2011. Michael Petroforte, “Some disadvantages of server virtualization” 4sysopsweb, 3 July 2008. Web. 2 Dec. 2011. 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