News

posted on 24 April 2008 09:51

IT research house Gartner has identified the six best practices companies should consider before they virtualize their servers. Storage consolidation is a critical one of them.

Gartner says that virtualization can be implemented badly in costs, management strategy, approach, architecture and software. Most of these problems can be avoided with careful pre-virtualization assessments. The six best practices are:-

1. Start small, think big. A first virtualization phase focuses on server consolidation, cost savings and increased hardware use. The second phase is more strategically important, more complex to implement and provides far more value. Here the focus shifts to delivering new services or improving the quality and speed of service.

2. Require a rapid ROI. A business case for server virtualization should show a full return on investment within six months or less

3. Virtualize the right applications. Aplications with high input output needs can be inefficient on virtual machines and applications that are effectively utilising established hardware are not going to generate savings. The best applications to focus on tend to be older, smaller packaged applications.

4. Define your storage strategy. This is a critical factor. If a company stores virtual images on a direct-attached storage, then they will limit the ability to replicate or recover those virtual images, especially in the event of a failure. If the images are stored on a central storage system, then companies have the flexibility to access virtual images from any server connected to the storage system.

5. Understand software issues. Gartner predicts that software pricing and licensing will remain problematic for the near future. Until new pricing models are found, users should seek to understand independent software vendor’s (ISV’s) pricing and licensing policies in as much detail as possible and accept that until ISV issues are resolved, smaller servers will be the norm.

6. Combine virtual machines effectively. It is much more important to come up with a flexible process for dynamically relocating server capacity than it is to devise a perfect static consolidation mapping. Workloads change and being able to deal with these changes dynamically is a key goal, particularly in the early stages of virtualisation.

More information is available in the Gartner report “Best Practices Before You Virtualise Your Servers." The report is available on Gartner’s Web site.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}