Plan the data protection mechanism for the virtual infrastructure

As an IT manager for a small and medium-sized enterprise, you may have heard of the advantages of virtualization technology. The next step is to easily handle the work of migrating to a virtual infrastructure and ensure that the virtual infrastructure is protected effectively.

First, it's important to know what you're going to do to plan your virtual infrastructure and then choose the right data protection mechanism. One of the most important tasks is to identify and select the capabilities and limitations of the data protection mechanism in your virtual infrastructure.

In order to simplify, this paper gives the virtualization platform to VMware ESX as an example. In addition to the last step: determining the right deployment method, the following procedures are the same for Microsoft Hyper-V, virtual iron, and other virtualization platforms.

What applications should I virtualize?

With the current virtualization technology, almost all applications can be virtualized. You simply select a reasonable set of applications and then assemble the following information:

1. Verify the characteristics of the selected application in the load state.

It is absolutely important to describe the characteristics of these applications under the maximum expected load, or you will start to experience a sudden run out of resources after you deploy your virtual infrastructure.

• Total Memory footprint

How much memory does an application consume under peak load? If the application "leaks" memory (even under a constant load, memory footprint becomes larger), you need to make room for that.

• Total CPU occupancy rate

How many CPUs are used and what percentage is the peak load? When you are measuring, don't forget to write down the type of CPU you are using.

• Total disk space, including the disk space required for growth before the next budget cycle

• Network bandwidth occupancy rate

The network bandwidth that an application occupies under a peak load. Remember to take into account the network traffic in and out of two directions.

• Storage network throughput as input and output (SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and network-attached storage)

For messaging networks, you should also consider this.

• Read and write disk

The disk activity that an application requires in a load state. You may also want to describe the characteristics of other disk load parameters, depending on your application.

• Memory bus occupancy estimate, that is, the available bandwidth of the memory bus-(total I/O bandwidth) x 4

Years of empirical data have confirmed this practical rule of thumb. Because it is not always easy to verify the memory bus speed of a system, it may be difficult to get this number.