Mission Critical Application Virtualization

Virtualization has become a key IT infrastructure technology. Its ability to facilitate server consolidation increases your hardware ROI while simultaneously reducing your management and infrastructure requirements. Single purpose servers typically average about 10-15% utilization. Virtualization and server consolidation can drive that utilization rate up to 75-85% -- giving you a lot more bang for your buck. Virtualization also offers clear benefits in deployment, availability and management. Using prebuilt images you can deploy new virtual servers in a matter of minutes eliminating lengthy hardware deployment and setup times. Technologies like Live Migration provide improved availability by enabling you to perform scheduled system maintenance during normal working hours with no interruption of end-user services. This makes life easier for IT by eliminating the need to perform maintenance during off-hours and for end users as well by providing increased application availability.

The key gotcha to virtualizing mission critical applications has always been performance. By definition server consolidation means you’re running multiple workloads on a single shared hardware platform. This means you’re not going to get that same performance as if that server workload were running directly on the physical box. Recent advances in server hardware, virtualization and storage have really effectively offset the virtualization performance penalty. Today’s multi-core x64 CPUs with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) provide much better performance and virtual machine scalability than the previous generation of hardware making it possible to achieve higher levels of server consolidation and still meet your SLAs. Enhancements in the virtualization platforms like Hyper-V and vSphere have also significantly boosted VM scalability. With the release of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and vSphere 5.1 both platforms are capable of supporting VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of RAM. That offers enough scalability to handle all but the most extreme workloads.

While todays CPUs and virtualization platforms offer the raw compute power to handle most virtualization workloads it’s just as important to make sure your storage systems can handle I/O intensive virtualized workloads like SQL Server, Exchange and SAP. Modern advancements in storage can both improve the performance of your mission critical virtualized applications and make them easier to manage as well. Technologies like automated storage tiering can take the guesswork out of configuring your storage by automatically moving the storage for your hot I/O intensive workloads to high performance flash storage and your cooler I/O workload to lower performance higher capacity drives. On-going monitoring allows automated tiering solutions to dynamically adjust to changing resource requirements. Other new storage technologies like all-flash storage arrays can provide huge boosts in performance for I/O bound workloads by eliminating the rotational latency that’s associated with standard disk drives.

Today there’s no real reason not to virtualize your mission critical applications. With proper planning the performance of virtualized applications can rival physical servers and the advantages like the speed to deployment, improved availability and disaster recovery will continue the push to make virtualization the standard for all IT infrastructure servers.