Clever deployment of virtualization to avoid unnecessary waste (1)

Server virtualization is said to be the most significant way to improve enterprise operation efficiency, reduce IT costs and reduce environmental carbon emissions. It is said that the effective application of virtualization technology can reduce server energy consumption by up to 82%. Unfortunately, many enterprises that accept server virtualization have not achieved the expected savings. Why? Because they have been virtualizing waste.

To realize the full potential of server virtualization, virtual servers must be carefully managed and used. Enterprise Users must deploy virtualization for valuable things within their IT assets to achieve full efficiency and their expected return on investment in virtualization projects.

Virtualization spread 1: virtualization should save costs for IT, not waste costs

Although virtualization often promises to the industry that it can reduce the energy consumption of data centers and achieve energy conservation and emission reduction at the initial stage of the project, the operating costs associated with running servers are many times the energy costs. At present, it is so easy to quickly configure new virtual machines. The number of created virtual machines far exceeds the number of physical servers without virtualization. The IT department will create new virtual machines to test their ideas or try out an application software before committing to formal implementation, unless there is strict control, otherwise, these virtual servers will be idle after testing. Although they do not occupy physical space or require additional cooling, they consume valuable hard disk storage resources, memory, and central processor resources that can be used to configure more useful workloads. In addition, they are completely waste.

As we all know, the spread of virtual servers has become a real concern for enterprise users around the world.

Unpredictable cost of Virtualization

Enterprise users focus too much on the energy and space savings that may be achieved through virtualization. This also leads them to mistakenly think that running a virtual server is very cheap. In fact, deploying a virtual machine does include a lot of hidden costs.

One-level costs are related to devices-server hardware and storage hardware. Enterprise users need to consume better energy when purchasing more specialized server hosts to support increasing virtual machines. The standard specification of these servers purchased for hosting virtual machines is usually higher than that of the X86 server on a single machine. Hosting multiple virtual servers requires more central processor resources and larger memory, which consume more energy and generate more heat.

If an IT department virtualizes 100% of its physical servers, IT will indeed operate more servers than they started. Although the carbon emissions of the physical and environmental sectors have changed, the IT department still needs to monitor, patch, security maintenance, backup, and license the virtual servers and today's server hosts.

As the number of virtual machines increases, the required storage resources also increase, which leads to an increase in storage hardware. It takes time to back up these extra images. Sometimes it is difficult to implement this in a specific maintenance window.

Another hidden cost is related to software license authorization. Enterprise Users cannot think that license authorization for physical servers can be converted to virtual machine license authorization at no extra cost. Some software vendors require license authorization for each server on the virtual host, which leads to a sharp increase in License authorization fees.

In addition, virtual machines may inevitably run applications in unusable environments. Even if the cost of license authorization is no longer a factor, the system configuration must be properly managed. Otherwise, the statistics on the number of licenses used for authorization are inaccurate. Waste also refers to host resource power supply, shared hard disk, Random storage) and IT efforts. If the virtual machine is still running after it is no longer needed, the advantage of virtualization technology will be lost. Gartner's research firm called this plausible View "virtualization capture 22 ".

Virtualization also increases the complexity of the server's total cost of ownership model. When each application software is surrounded by hardware, the internal cost return mechanism should play a role. The physical server host hosts multiple application software defined in different business departments. To compensate for this, it is incorrect for some enterprises to adopt this mode by simply applying the cost of operating physical servers to each virtual server.

Efficiency is the key

There is no mechanism to determine which server is executing useful tasks. It is very easy to enable the server, but this is useless. It also causes enterprises to deploy virtualization for useless servers as part of the virtualization plan, and then brings about the spread of virtualization.

This situation can be justified because it is difficult to determine whether the server is no longer used. The most centralized monitoring solution is the overall usage, input/output, and so on of the central processor designed for very advanced performance standards ). These numbers are useless because the running data center needs to use many different system maintenance tools on their servers, which shields the fact that the server may not be used at all.

At present, there are tools specifically designed for efficiency to help enterprise users identify those that are useful and when to use them. With such knowledge, building a process to recycle useless resources and avoid unnecessary spending on new resources makes it easier.

 
Illustration: the key to improving virtualization efficiency is the virtualization Analysis of useful work.