Gradually deploy data center Virtualization

Virtualization has been rapidly popularized at a rate that surpasses everyone's imagination. Many companies around us are very interested in introducing virtualization. This articleArticleWe have discussed the deployment of server virtualization. You can understand the different types of virtualization and what changes virtualization technology brings to server and architecture management, it even has access to some hardware and software products.

Virtualization management and measurement standards

Although server virtualization is widely defined, there is only one core of virtualization. Each concept adds a level of complexity to management. In other words, if you want to deploy server virtualization in your data center and simplify project management, you need to think twice. In fact, these VMS still need to be managed by someone.

It is difficult for us to manage devices that lack a measurement standard, so SPEC (standard performance evaluation company standard performance evaluation Corp.) announced that it will develop benchmarks to test server virtualization performance. To encourage non-profit organizations such as spec to develop testing benchmarks, including AMD, Dell, Intel, sun, IBM, VMWare, and other IT giants, a committee is formed by all vendors, funding the project.

To make full use of virtualization, we must first measure the value of virtualization.

After the statement was issued, spec President Walter bays described to us the form in which the spec server virtualization benchmark will appear. In addition, due to the applicationProgramOr the hardware performance can effectively reflect the performance of server virtualization. Therefore, developing a benchmark for testing server virtualization is a very complicated task.

Virtualization saves power for enterprises and enables rapid recovery of system crashes

If server virtualization is so complex and there will be no performance testing benchmark in a period of time, why do we need to deploy virtualization? Simply put, virtualization can reduce your spending on power costs. Last year, the equipment company Pacific Gas & Electric (PG & E) in Northern California ran a brand new incentive program, it is designed to reduce enterprises' energy consumption. During the project running process, PG & E saves a lot of costs because it adopts virtualization technology in the data center.

However, reducing your power bill is only one of the benefits of server virtualization for data center operations. After using virtualization technology, the data center of the Las Vegas Valley Water District (lvvw) company found that virtualization can reduce the system load of servers in addition to saving electricity fees, in the case of power shortage or unexpected interruptions, virtualization can help the company quickly recover from server system crashes.

Pbnj solutions Paul Winkler is an IT information company and distributor in Ohio. The company also believes that server virtualization can simplify the recovery of data centers. In addition, the main advantage of server virtualization is that disaster recovery can be tested in Virtual Situations, but such virtual testing will take a lot of time.

Sungard also provides disaster recovery services under virtualization, which uses server virtualization and VMWare to provide customers with accelerated fault recovery. Don norbeck, product development manager of sungard, said the company's recent survey showed that for most customers, traditional 48-hour fault recovery could no longer meet their needs; they need 12 hours to restore the system.

Blade Server, X86 architecture server, and mainframe: Which platform is most suitable for virtualization?

Data center managers who operate the mainframe usually have years of experience running virtualization on the mainframe. Big Iron said that running virtualization on the mainframe is more attractive than before, because for users, increased mainframe deployment virtualization, it can provide users with a simpler environment than x86 servers.

As kernochan pointed out, the key to deploying virtualization on the mainframe is the Z/Vm platform. In the latest version, Z/Vm 5.3 supports more memory and additional processing capabilities, which provides higher workload for virtualization running on the mainframe. Therefore, upgrading from an X86 server to the Z platform is also a natural step, but this is equivalent to consolidating the Linux status.

However, when considering virtualization, data centers do not always focus on the mainframe. Because it can increase the computing density, blade servers have become a popular choice. In fact, Data Center expert Kyle Rankin is spending a lot of money to build extremely high-density servers with blade servers. Combining blade server virtualization with SAN technology will save a lot of hardware and power costs for the data center.

Even so, IT managers need to consider the various aspects of purchasing blade servers to build virtualization projects. For many virtualization projects, the blade server may be an excellent choice, but it is not the best choice for heavy-load computing such as a virtual SQL Server. In other words, when you deploy virtualization using a blade server, there is no proper mode.

In addition, Unix servers are also an option for running virtualization. In fact, Sun provides support for running xen virtualization on his Solaris OS, which has attracted many users to adopt his UNIX platform. Open-source opensolaris and xen virtualization have become available options for other UNIX providers that want to enter the virtualization field.

Server virtualization software and support management tools

With virtualization hardware, data center managers must carefully choose their virtualization software. Chris Wolf, A virtualization expert and lecturer at ECPI, said the maturity of virtualization software management tools and the expansion of servers are very serious problems. He added that VMWare has been proven to be a mature public data center virtualization tool. In fact, the Infrastructure 3 Package released by VMware aims to integrate virtualization and management software, which also indicates the future direction of virtualization software development.

In addition to VMware's management tools, users who want to maintain low cost and high flexibility can choose open source virtualization management software such as groundwork and Nagios. However, Joseph foran, IT manager at FSW, a non-profit human services organization in Connecticut, pointed out that IT staff still have to be trained enough to make effective use of these management tools.

In addition, open-source software has gone beyond the scope of management tools. Mandriva is a publisher of the Linux operating system. He provides openvz virtualization software in the latest server patch package Corporate Server 4.0, this patch package is considered to be an open-source software comparable to VMware's virtualization software. In general, more and more server virtualization software and corresponding support management tools are available to meet the majority of data center managers. Their development also promotes virtualization deployment.