How do I get through the last mile of server virtualization?

The advantages of virtualization are not to mention, and everyone is familiar with them. At the same time, it is undeniable that, in the face of this technology, there are still a considerable number of enterprise users with a respectful attitude, perhaps in their hearts, they always feel that "real", "hard", and "physical" are always more reliable than "virtual", "soft", and "logical, just like physical devices seem to be easier to understand, but after they become logical devices, they cannot find the margin ...... This makes many people feel excited, pleasantly surprised, and curious after hearing the word virtualization for the first time. At the same time, they are also accompanied by doubts and worries.

In addition to these outdoor applications that still have doubts about virtualization, some users have gained a deeper understanding of the benefits of Server rental virtualization after years of market cultivation, but when they are approaching this technology for these advantages and highlights, or have already embarked on the road to virtualization, they will find more doubts and difficulties waiting for them, looking at the experiences of these two types of users, we can summarize the six major problems or challenges that users encountered before and during the implementation of virtualization, as shown below:

1. What systems and applications are suitable for virtualization? What kind of virtualization technology is not required?

The information director of a large manufacturing company has been tracking server virtualization technology for many years, but he said, "the benefits of virtualization can be very clear to us, however, the 'last kilometer 'is difficult for me." The last mile is that he does not know which of the existing Server systems and applications of his enterprise are suitable for virtualization and which users and application environments do not need to use this technology.

The supervisor admitted that the company has a large and complex IT infrastructure, many departments and applications, and hundreds of servers. Therefore, when you want to deploy virtualization, but I don't know how to start it. It's like you know the benefits of virtualization and the results of virtualization implementation, but the steps between them don't know how to proceed. I believe there are not many users who need to be instructed at this stage.

2. Should we choose a computer with a CPU-level CPU or x86 architecture server for virtualization?

Li is the Information Director of a securities company established soon. Due to rapid business expansion, the demand for IT infrastructure is getting stronger and stronger, this gave him the idea of integrating IT infrastructure through virtualization technology for a long time, but he encountered problems in the specific selection. "Securities trading is the key application of our core. It requires the absolute stability and reliability of the system. Otherwise, it will pose a great risk to the customer's transactions and the reputation of our company. We also saw the huge benefits of Virtualization for our business systems. However, we have been hesitant about the specific device selection. The cost advantages of x86 servers are obvious, but we all know that virtualization technology was initially migrated from the mainframe and minicomputer to the x86 server, and the reliability and availability of minicomputers seem to be higher. From this perspective, is it more appropriate to choose a minicomputer virtualization solution?"

Compared to the case described in the first challenge, Li has a much clearer requirement, but there are new troubles due to the large number of technical solutions to be selected, in the context of a large market where both the RISC and x86 camps jointly educate enterprise users, such doubts do exist for users who require Virtualization of key services.

3. Which product should I choose on the server virtualization management layer, that is, the virtualization platform or virtual machine manager?

As we all know, in the x86 server market, there are currently three major server virtualization management software vendors, namely Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, and other participants, such as RedHat, similar to the x86 and ldss camps, these vendors are also jointly educating enterprise users to switch to virtualization. Only one server can be rented. The IT Director of a retailer once complained, saying that the technologies on the surface are similar and have the same strength, but I really don't know which one will be better, this confusion has slowed down their implementation of virtualization. In fact, the impact of this problem is equally broad. I believe that every user entering the virtualization world has had such a choice.

4. What should I do if the performance after virtualization is unsatisfactory?

A trading company's business system was integrated and optimized through virtualization, but IT was later found that the virtualized virtual machine performance was not very satisfactory, its IT manager said, "observing the resource usage of each virtual machine, we found that there are still a lot of idle resources, but from the service response speed, we see a slower effect than the traditional physical server." In the end, the specific resource usage analysis shows that although the CPU usage of each virtual machine is very low, the concurrent network access of multiple virtual machines often occurs, at this time, the network I/O throughput becomes a bottleneck restricting the performance of virtual machines. The manager said that when I first purchased the server, I specifically asked the CPU and memory to have a top configuration. I didn't expect a problem in the network I/O aspect. It seems that Virtualization has a great weakness.

The conclusion of this company should be benevolent, but in fact, it is not uncommon that the performance is unsatisfactory after virtualization is implemented. Therefore, it cannot help more customers to hesitate whether to adopt virtualization technology.

　5. How can we ensure the flexibility of real-time migration of virtual machines?

For IT technicians of Internet enterprises, IT is very important to ensure the rapid growth of business in the case of limited IT investment, therefore, Internet companies are the first to focus on and the first to adopt virtualization, but this also generates a worry-the CIO of a fast-growing Internet company once said, "The business scale of our data center is growing very fast. Thanks to virtualization, we can integrate most of our resources. Now we are considering a large-scale update to a new generation of high-performance servers, but how to achieve stable migration of so many virtual machines is a big problem. It is a great test to ensure our business continuity."

Indeed, the emergence of new processors, new commands, and new system design have brought new opportunities for application development. However, they also raised questions about the compatibility of virtual machines with physical server bearer platforms, this problem is especially evident for customers who have long deployed virtualization technology and want to update and adopt the latest server products.

6. Is server virtualization reliable when multiple applications are concentrated on one physical server?

One important advantage of virtualization is that it can deploy multiple customer operating systems on one physical server and run multiple enterprise-level applications on it without interfering with each other, but this is often worrying-if this server goes down, will all the above virtual machines disappear? This is obviously related to enterprise applications, in particular, high reliability is closely related to key application requirements, virtualization, similar to putting all eggs in a blue box, seems to be in conflict with the traditional awareness of risk sharing-there are not a few users with such concerns, to a large extent, it has also become the biggest ideological resistance to the popularization of virtualization.