Last month at Microsoft TechEd 2011, I presented the topic of Accelerating Your Journey to the Private Cloud based on Microsoft virtualization and EMC technologies. Below is a recap of this presentation, the full audio version and slides can be found at the Microsoft TechEd website or a replay of this presentation is also available at the Windows IT Pro website.
First it is important to understand the phases that EMC believes all companies go through when virtualizing their datacenter, regardless of the technologies used or the size of the company. The journey to virtualization consists of three phases which are related to the amount of virtualization that has occurred. The first phase consists of virtualizing IT Production applications. In this first phase customers begin virtualizing and expand this to include up to 30% of their workloads. The second phase involves virtualizing Business Production applications as companies virtualize up to 50% to 85% of their environment. The third phase is IT as a Service and allows companies to run IT as a business with 95% or more virtualization in the environment.
In Phase 1, companies are looking for opportunities to consolidate and tend to try virtualization on workloads that have low performance overhead and won't have much impact to a majority of the users. This is an ideal time to use planning tools to find server and application candidates to virtualize or ROI tools to present a business case on the financial benefits to virtualizing. Servers that tend to get virtualized include file & print servers and IT owned applications such as Active Directory. As customers become more comfortable with virtualization I tend to see them extending this to Microsoft Exchange server roles (HUB, CAS, etc) for consolidation and simplified management. Is virtualizing Exchange supported? Absolutely if you follow the guidelines outlined in Microsoft's support article!
From a storage perspective you want to ensure you are using hardware that is flexible (can easily grow as you continue to consolidate and virtualize), dynamic (supports all protocols and multiple drive types on the array since different applications have different demands) and is easy to manage (virtualization is meant to simplify the environment and this should include the infrastructure involved).
As companies move on to Phase 2, they begin to realize the benefits of virtualization and start to virtualize all workloads unless proven it can't be. In this phase, business production and even mission critical applications are being virtualized such as Microsoft SQL Server, Sharepoint Server or SAP. What's important at this phase is designing for the application, not for virtualization. In other words, continue to follow best practices for the applications and architect it as if it was physical but do it virtually! Ignoring application best practices tend to be the biggest mistakes a company can make. A design goal should be that the end users don't know if their servers and applications are physical or virtual.
It is during this phase that companies start to realize power and cooling savings, simplified management, and advanced data protection. Applications that tend to have multiple servers associated with it such as Sharepoint or Exchange can be replicated and restored together helping to improve response times.
This is also when companies tend to implement advanced management tools such as Microsoft System Center. It is important to work with vendors who plug into these tools to help simplify and consolidate management tools. EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (ability for the array to move workloads that demand high response times to the fastest drives automatically and then move the data back to their original cost effective solution) is an example of technology in the infrastructure that can help improve performance for the virtual world while making life easier for the administrators.
Finally, companies reach Phase 3 where they can run IT as a business. This means IT can track usage and charge departments back for resources. It also allows for automation and workflow orchestration so complex tasks can be completed with little or no user intervention or to pass along the process of requesting storage and virtual machine creation directly to the end user. At this stage customers are on the way to becoming fully virtualized with a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure and can consider other options such as moving services to a public cloud, a hybrid cloud model or continue to enjoy the benefits of a fully virtualized private cloud!
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