Planning a Virtualization Infrastructure – What You Need to Know

June 2nd, 2008 by Adnan Hindi

There’s a lot of noise about virtualization out in the marketplace – from the latest company VMware bought to speculation about Hyper-V to the myriad solutions for virtualization management. I wanted to take a more practical approach to talking about virtualization and share advice and best practices that I’ve learned based upon my own experiences planning, deploying and managing large-scale multi-datacenter virtualization infrastructure.

In this first post, I cover the planning process and various considerations that anyone - from a small “mom and pop” shop to a large enterprise – should take into account for successful deployment.

1) What problem(s) are you trying to solve? What are you trying to achieve?

It should come as no surprise that this is the first step but surprisingly it’s a step that is sometimes ignored or not enough time and thought are spent against it in the rush to virtualize. Without really understanding what problem you’re trying to solve and what you’re trying to achieve, how will you ever know that you’ve been successful? Some typical reasons to virtualize:

• Server consolidation and cost savings. ROI and TCO.
• Efficient resource utilization. Chargeback model and measurement.
• Cost-effective growth strategy. Cost avoidance.

2) What resources do you have and what additional resources do you need?

You need to understand your current environment before adding virtualization to the mix. Peel back the onion and look at historical performance. You may not have the right hardware to handle an increase in virtual servers.

Factor in the pattern of the behavior of servers, whether they are running hot during business hours or at night, peak cycles, etc. Are they CPU-intensive or is the gating factor disk or memory or a combination of these? This information forms the performance baseline you must factor into any virtualization capacity planning.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a capacity plan. People tend to virtualize but don’t always have a capacity plan in place to know when they’re running at full.

Beyond computing assets, you need to look at staffing as well. How will virtualization effect staff resource utilization? Virtualization, done the right way, should gain you efficiencies on the staffing side as well, freeing up resources for other initiatives. But in order to do it the “right way”, that takes an investment in training that should always be factored into your planning.

3) What are your success metrics?

Make sure to draft a document to formally measure your success before, during, and after implementing a virtualized environment. This relates back to the problem you were trying to solve. Depending on what you need to measure, you need to plan for tools and processes to make this a reality.

In the next post, I’ll talk about roadblocks to successful virtualization deployment and how to avoid them.

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June 2nd, 2008