Scott Herold has seen it all before. Companies buy
virtualisation in a bid to make their operation more efficient.
Then admins start creating virtual machines at the drop of a hat,
to satisfy the whims of developers and other users who need a clean
OS image, just for a minute.
"One customer said they had 1,500 virtual machines, and went
back to check the due diligence they did during physical-to-virtual
migration, and they have only 500 Virtual machines with a valid
business case," says the lead architect for the virtualisation
business at Quest Software's
Vizioncore subsidiary.
Just because you're virtualising everything on a server doesn't
mean that you can dispense with systems management discipline.
Abstracting logical assets from physical ones makes them more prone
to proliferation and movement, and datacentre managers who have to
look after those physical resources must be sure that they're not
overtaxed. Add to that the need to fold virtualised environments
into a disaster recovery strategy, and it's easy to see how
unprepared IT departments who thought they were buying the answer
to all their problems end up with a logical infrastructure
spiralling out of control.
VMware, the poster child of
modern virtualisation industry, has been busily releasing products
that help to integrate its virtualisation offering into the
datacentre. "It's taken it a while to admit that it isn't the
entire stack - that it's more middleware than an end-to-end
solution," says Chris Wolf, a senior analyst at the Burton
Group.
Backup and patch management
Nevertheless, the company is trying hard to cover all the
management bases. Its VMware Infrastructure, designed to manage the
virtual infrastructure, comes in three editions depending on
company size. All of them feature backup and patch management
capabilities, but there are extras, bundled as the edition becomes
more sophisticated. The standard edition adds in VMware High
Availability, which provides failover services for virtual
machines. The Enterprise edition includes power management
features, along with VMotion, a six-year-old product providing
dynamic resource scheduling services.
"The first-use case for server virtualisation was
consolidation," explains Lionel Cavalliere, senior product
marketing manager for EMEA at VMware, who says that VMotion took
things a step further by enabling physical servers to work together
and provide virtual machines with extra support. "It's a technology
allowing live migration from one physical machine to another,
without any loss of transactions," he says. That makes it useful
for routine maintenance and also for managing server load more
effectively.
But even though it has the advantage of selling the hypervisor
as well as the software to manage it, VMware faces stiff
competition. Other firms are jockeying for position in the
virtualisation management market. Products such as Quest's
vOptimizer Pro help to mitigate Virtual machines sprawl by
regularly monitoring Virtual machines usage against pre-defined
criteria, making it easier for administrators to rein in the
Virtual machines they no longer need.
Incremental replication
Quest is also one of several companies providing image-level
backups for Virtual machines. Virtualisation can also be used to
enhance existing disaster recovery practices, points out John
Stetic, director of product management at
Novell, who came to the company
when it purchased virtualisation management company Platespin. "We
can replicate into an offline virtual machine. So now you have not
only a backup repository of your production workload, but you can
also use that backup repository as a recovery environment." The
company packaged this up into an appliance with its Forge product.
It supports incremental replication roughly every six minutes.
"We're not a replacement for a clustering solution," he adds.
Neverfail sells
products designed to back up specific Windows-based applications
such as Exchange and Sharepoint. "We're a solution for high
availability disaster recovery that embraces both the physical and
virtual worlds," says senior vice-president Andrew Barnes. "It lets
you protect multiple physical machines, maybe one running Exchange,
and one running SQL, with a single VMware machine providing the
secondary failover server capability." With Neverfail's product you
don't need shared storage unlike VMware HA.
What's missing now is a robust integration strategy between some
of these products and those sold by the larger systems management
vendors, such as Tivoli and Openview. "I don't think it has
articulated their management integration story as well as it
could," says Burton's Wolf in regard to VMware. Nevertheless, the
company is making strides in this area. It signed a partnership to
integrate support for its virtualisation system into BMCs
management software. It has also published the VI API, which allows
other programs to communicate with the VMware Infrastructure
platform for the control of Virtual machines.
As virtualisation gains mindshare, then, the tools and
techniques to manage it are evolving nicely. Customers would do
well to deploy these if they are to get the full benefit of
virtualisation and minimise the downsides associated with sloppy
usage.