Do you really understand enterprise virtualization?

Do you really understand enterprise virtualization?

This article is provided by the "Enterprise Virtual Machine application: Play to VMware VI, Hyper-V R2, Xen Server"

This book will be available for sale in Xinhua bookstore this month

Now the word Virtualization (virtualization) in every media, virtual machine products are dazzling, but in so many products and technology, your business is really the need for virtualization. In fact, according to IDG's statistics, more than 90% of enterprises in the next three years is not a virtualization program, is already using virtual technology. But many companies do not understand the meaning of virtualization, so about 30% of the enterprises after virtualization, and not to achieve the desired results, so for large enterprises already have a complex IT infrastructure or dozens of to hundreds of PCs or servers of small and medium-sized enterprises, really understand and take the correct virtualization steps, is the key to the success of virtualization.

The main purpose of enterprise virtualization
There is a big difference between the virtual machine products that individuals use and the Enterprise class. Personal computers do not have too many problems with resources, so the virtualization on personal computers is mainly based on testing, isolating the environment and applying convenience. But enterprise-class virtualization products, the biggest goal is to reduce costs, including the initial cost of construction, operating costs, management costs to reduce disaster losses, as well as personnel costs and so on.

initial cost of construction
For example, a retail-oriented enterprise, in the country has more than 5,000 branches, headquarters has 1000 people's office, and the backend has CRM, ERP, BI and other systems, what specification needs the virtualization architecture. A software company based on development, with 200 engineers and 100 sales staff, what kind of virtualized environment is needed. In fact, in terms of initial cost, virtualization has evolved from the earliest products (product), the gradual evolution of systems (System), the overall solution (total Solution) to the current design base (fundamentals). In other words, when building an IT environment, the enterprise is not "to choose a virtualization solution", but "to design the IT environment with the principle of virtualization." This idea makes a big difference in initial costs.
Here, we want to propose a simple calculation concept, that is, in the absence of security and performance impact, the cost of each of the software or hardware can be played to 100% efficiency, in order to achieve the desired results of virtualization. On the server, how to evaluate the efficiency of cpu/ram is most important. The higher the efficiency of CPU usage, the higher the initial cost can be saved, and it will also affect the electricity and cooling costs. This is also an important consideration when it comes to enterprise virtualization. Using a professional assessment tool to determine the different virtualization compression ratios (i.e., the number of virtual machines that can be performed on a single entity server) is the most important factor in reducing the initial cost of construction.

Operating costs
After it is established, the cost of it appliances, people, management, and maintenance must be determined by the capabilities of the virtual machine product. For example, VMware ESX 4.0 can shut down the CPU without a burden (which must be supported by CPU hardware), reducing the power consumption of the CPU, saving electricity and cooling costs. And ESX can also cooperate with Vmotion and DRS, so that the resources between multiple servers to achieve the maximum balance, you can also let the server into the empty sleep, and does not affect the day-to-day implementation of the enterprise.

Management costs
Management cost is the most important is to save a lot of server and equipment management work. In general, the use of a virtual machine more than one OS can achieve a stand-alone server, such as CPU, RAM dynamic allocation, build never downtime system, fast backup, fast data recovery, no need to the site to start maintenance upgrades. These are complex transactions that require a lot of management and labor costs in the absence of virtualized environments, and after virtualization, the overall cost can be lowered below 10%, which sounds like a myth.

Disaster Losses
System stop is the most fear of business. Enterprises all over the world due to the lack of early warning system to stop the loss (including hardware failures, software failures, malicious attacks, etc.) up to hundreds of billions of enterprises, if there is no complete backup, disaster response and other plans, these losses on the enterprise damage is irreparable. After using the correct virtual machine product, not only can the system immediately restore to a few seconds before the failure of the state, but also in a few seconds to complete the recovery, which used to only use failover Cluster, NLB and other functions or expensive devices such as F5, completed by the function, After the virtual machine can be extended to any size of the enterprise.

staff costs
Although China's IT personnel pay is not high, but the cost of personnel used in basic work is more wasteful. For example, if a desktop office is unavailable, most of the time you ask IT staff to check what's going on and find a way to troubleshoot it. But it often takes hours to get back to normal work from a troubleshooting start. At this time the loss is not only the cost of IT staff, but also the average staff hours. Most of the more experienced enterprises will use Ghost to do mirroring, but when the computer is more and more, each person's use environment began to have a big difference, ghost can not meet this condition. and large enterprises at thousands of computers, is definitely not a simple ghost can complete this work.
If you use the concept of desktop virtualization, put each desktop computer into the server's virtual machine. Use the virtual machine Snapshot (Snapshot) feature to store the normal state of each computer during a fixed period of time. Separate storage devices are also available for the data. For example, if the office just doesn't work, just back up the entire OS to the last normal snapshot, the system can be used right away (as little as a few seconds), so that IT staff doesn't have to spend their time on a job that doesn't have a technical component but takes time.

Conclusion
Enterprise-level virtualization has many tools to use, but it has to be done for different industries and sizes. The current energy-saving emission reduction is the worldwide trend, using virtualization technology, you can use less power to do the same job, not only to save electricity, but also to protect the earth to do a good job, not yet virtualization enterprises, is to start seriously thinking about the latest technology of the time.