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A New IT Architecture?
As vendors scramble to fix licensing and performance issues, a larger quandary looms. The fundamental challenge for CIOs who want to do more with server virtualization is that they must rethink their IT architecture by organizing data components as shared resources. Virtual servers affect everything they touch -- clustering, file systems, backup, storage, management -- and do so differently from physical servers. They can also be easily moved around the network from one physical server to another to optimize a data center's resources.
That means CIOs need automation management tools and processes to track virtual servers and quickly reconfigure network connections to firewalls and load balancers, among other technologies. "It's not practical to move virtual servers around if I have to manually reconfigure it," says Gillett.
But the management technology isn't quite there yet. "Systems management software should recognize the difference between physical servers and virtual servers and manage those differences because they are not the same," says Forrester's Gillett. "This will be a two- or three-year journey with everybody working through the implications." In the meantime, that puts the onus on user development of smart processes and procedures. For example, Patrick Bellor, director of infrastructure at Midwest Generation LLC, a Chicago-based power producer and sister company of Southern California Edison, has rewritten his policy book to handle incoming virtual servers; Midwest Generation has been in virtual server project planning mode for some eight months. With VMware, the goal is to whittle down 87 physical servers to about two. As of December, only four servers had been virtualized.
What's taking so long? "We're developing a roadmap for the next five years," says Bellor. "If you're just sticking in a CD, installing VMware and creating all these servers, you're going to have a management problem. It is imperative that folks focus on the process of managing this environment."
For instance, Bellor says he's fleshing out how his department will handle technology requests from the applications team on virtual servers as well as track those requests and bring them to market. Midwest Generation is working with software vendor Network General, a provider of enterprise application and network performance analysis tools, to understand how a virtual environment will affect the distributed sniffer (an application that detects network bottlenecks), storage area network and other areas of the data center. "It's definitely a culture change," he says. "I can't go up to the server, look at the monitor and see what I used to be able to see."
Smart management also means anticipating virtual sprawl, an irony given that virtual servers promise to prevent physical server sprawl. "Virtual servers are so easy to put up," says St. Peter's Health Care Services' Goldberg. Generally speaking, more technology projects will be green-lighted in a virtual server environment because they won't be weighed down by the expense of a physical server. Virtual test servers are already popping up at St. Peter's Health Care Services, Goldberg says, "and we have to remember to take them down."
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