10th July 2008
It seems like everyone is talking about virtualisation, those
with a history in the IBM mainframe world will suggest they’ve seen
it all before and indeed there are parallels when it comes to
creating effective licensing structures.
Virtualisation has the potential to transform the way many
organisations utilise software resources. According to
Information Age’s Annual 2008 Effective IT Survey*, virtualisation is this year’s hottest
technology.
The survey reports on the technologies that IT decision-makers
have actively deployed in the enterprise. Over the last 12
months it demonstrated that adoption of virtualisation has soared
and that over 85% of those who have adopted the technology were
already convinced of its effectiveness.
But what are the real issues behind virtualisation? What
are the different types of virtualisation? How should it be
introduced, managed and monitored? What are the
pitfalls? And how and when will an effective licensing
structure evolve? In this article, Phil Heap, Head of
Consultancy Services at FAST addresses many of these
burning questions.
The green agenda
It is easy to suggest that it is the green issue that has swept
virtualisation onto the IT Director’s ‘must-tackle it’
agenda. Certainly environmental and sustainability
concerns - and the potential to save power within the data
centre - has been a catalyst. But there are other reasons: an
increasing demand for fast deployment and resilience, compliance,
security, growing infrastructure complexity, mushrooming energy
prices, and limits on power availability. A measure of
virtualisation’s importance is that it is now on the Finance
Director’s radar and also featured in the Dilbert cartoon
strip, a clear signal that an issue has hit the board’s agenda.
Virtualisation is a broad term
that refers to the abstraction
of computer resources.
A technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing
resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end
users interact with these resources. There are actually 3
different kinds of virtualisation: Server (hardware)
Virtualisation, enabling a single physical computing device to look
like multiple devices; Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI),
enabling organisations to manage their desktop resources; and
Application Virtualisation, running software in an isolated
‘sandbox’ rather than via standard software installation.
Getting to grips with virtualisation
Virtualisation is undoubtedly collapsing the amount of hardware
organisations need to install, and it has completely changed the
landscape for the IT Director and the industry. However
virtualisation has disrupted the accepted link between software and
hardware, and this means that both vendors and users alike now need
to find new ways of licensing software. Many vendors in the
software industry have been looking at this and debating how a
licensing process might work.
One of the problems in take-up has been the lack of a
co-ordinated response to virtualisation from the vendors and it is
unlikely that a common virtual software licensing standard will
evolve in the next 3 years. There will certainly be more
responsibility on customers to track, monitor and prove metrics on
virtualised systems, as many vendors will lack the tools to monitor
true virtual licensing. Therefore, in some ways, the industry is
moving ahead with virtualisation at one level and struggling at
another.
In terms of licensing, there is no doubt that this has to be
fair for the customer. If you are using a server from a third
party, and just using 15 minutes in a monthly pay scheme, you could
pay the same as someone using it every hour, every day under the
same scheme. It has to be said, discussions like this, which
involve complex virtualised licence pricing models strike fear into
customers and vendors alike. This is because neither
contingent feels it has enough information to venture into a model
that breaks with former licensing tradition and potentially
introduces many unknown components.
Understanding the benefits
Rest assured, there are serious benefits to be gained from
virtualisation, including more effective management and disaster
recovery. There is a management benefit too. Instead of taking
a day to duplicate a server, organisations can do this in 10
minutes. In fact, it becomes so easy to create another server it
can become too easy and customers need to be wary of this.
Some of the overriding benefits of moving to a virtualised
environment include:
- The ability to consolidate the workloads of
servers to a single machine
- Savings on hardware, environmental costs,
management and administration of the server infrastructure
- Provisioning efficiency and more rapid
deployment
- Powerful debugging scenarios
- Easier software migration
- Enhanced security and virus protection
- Improvements to the user experience
- System migration, backup and
recovery tasks become easier and more manageable
- Savings on licensing costs
- Reduced configuration management costs
Buyer beware
Although many organisations are now looking into ways of using
virtualisation, there is a risk that organisations are already
adopting it for the wrong reasons - for example, the Finance
Director seeing virtualisation as a way to save money - or are
falling into bad practices, with a breakdown in security a
considerable risk.
Process, procedure and policy are critical. Companies must
not get distracted by the flashing lights of the virtual
environment. Poorly managed virtualisation can obscure software
licensing obligations and leave an organisation exposed to
unexpected costs. Software asset management (SAM) and more
importantly software licence management need to become real-time
disciplines that can manage increasingly dynamic virtual
environments.
IT asset management becomes twice as important because physical
and virtual assets need to be managed together consistently and the
dynamic relationship between the virtual and physical must be
tracked and auditable.
Tips for virtualisation success
Despite the success of companies like VMWare and IT Directors’
awareness of virtualisation, it is still early days in terms of a
picture of where widespread virtualisation will lead
us. Virtualisation is here to stay. It will have its
place like other technologies and it will help to solve issues and
drive down costs, but it does require very careful
planning.
It is another solution to another problem, not the solution to
all our problems. I heard of one organisation that after
virtualising, now has twice as many servers as it did originally
because staff have been bypassing corporate policies and
procedures. Take heed, the success of your virtual
environment will still come down to good IT management
practices.
For those organisations that are thinking of going down the
virtual route, a few tips to remember:
- Virtualisation or not, it’s still necessary to stick to good IT
management principles
- Both vendors and users will have to make some concessions on
licensing
- Getting towards a concept of ‘value’ would be useful for
both
- Think of the better deployment benefits in terms of support
staff that virtualisation offers
- Avoid the Finance Director’s ‘there’s a truckload of savings
here’ thinking
- Badly managed virtualisation could end up costing you more
* Source:
Information Age is a monthly UK publication, which issues its
Annual Effective IT Survey at the beginning of every year. The most
recent survey was released in January 2008
