Virtualizations Time to Roll - ' Alleviating Concerns ' (
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Alleviating Concerns
There's no question virtualization
has helped companies cut power and
cooling costs in their data centers,
slash hardware expenditures and get
applications up and running more
quickly. Some obstacles that stifled
early adoption persist today, but others
have gone away.
An August 2007 study by
Rackspace, a San Antonio Web hosting
firm, identified two major obstacles to
virtualization's adoption: lack of user
experience and immature technology.
In many ways, the two issues are
interconnected. The lack of experience
has roots in an old ethos among
IT professionals: Put one application
on a single physical server box. That
belief caused many companies to shy
away, says George Scangas, manager
of IT architecture at Welch's, the
Concord, Mass.-based juice and condiment
maker.
As a result, few IT staffers got experience
building and managing virtual
environments. What's more, early on,
some leading software vendors worried about virtualization's reliability,
as well as how the technology would
affect licensing and support, according
to Gartner analyst John Enck. Many of
those vendors actually wrote clauses
into their licensing agreements prohibiting
customers from deploying
their applications in virtual environments,
Enck says.
Because of those factors, companies
focused their virtualization
efforts around second-tier applications
—not mission-critical ones. The
new technology thrived in testing
and development, but production
remained out of reach.
Fast forward to today.
Software vendors no longer cringe
at the prospect of virtualization.
VMware's Raghuram doesn't think
vendors were so much spooked by the
idea of the technology as by the challenges
of properly configuring virtual
servers.
More software providers have come
to virtualization vendors looking for
certification and testing protocols to
ensure their products work with virtual
machines, according to Raghuram.
"As a technology company, you don't
want to be seen as a technology laggard,"
he says.
Customers, in turn, have shown an
increased willingness to include crucial
programs in their virtualization
efforts: More than 70% of respondents
to Rackspace's August survey said
they'd deploy mission-critical applications
in virtual environments.
Some IT executives haven't had a
choice. When Scangas joined Welch's
in late 2002, the company had already
dived in. Welch's was using VMware's
GSX server, a hosted virtualization
software tool, but has since upgraded
to ESX server, which introduced a
hypervisor that runs on top of the
server and controls the operating
system.
Initially, Welch's looked to reduce
the number of its aging Dell servers,
which were underused and took up
space in the data center. "If we didn't
have virtualization, we'd definitively be
in a new data center," Scangas says. A
new server facility, Scangas estimates,
would have cost in the high six figures.
Scangas didn't rush into running
mission-critical applications on
VMware. Quickly, though, he saw the
cost savings from less cabling, power
and rack space. Besides avoiding costs
of a new data center, Welch's saved
at least $300,000 in hardware costs,
he says. And that doesn't include the
savings from lower power and cooling
usage. (Scangas hasn't yet run those
numbers.)
The company now runs about
100 virtual machines, which Scangas
expects to increase to 110 or 120 in the
next three months as he deploys new
applications. He and his team have
about 12 virtual machines on each
physical box in production.
And as VMware's technology
matured with the ESX Server release,
Scangas has become more willing to
put business-critical programs on
VMware.
What's more, Scangas and his team
are looking to extend the technology
to meet Welch's disaster recovery
needs and boost the hardware savings
by eliminating the need for redundant
hardware in an off-site facility.
"There's so much potential," he says.
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