Microsoft launched their new virtualisation strategy on Monday, 8th of September, featuring Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. We often think of virtualisation of just being a collection of virtual machines running on a server. Microsoft, and C Infinity, sees it as being much more. Microsoft has several layers of virtualisation:
- Server Virtualisation: this is the concept we are used to hearing being advertised on the radio and discussed at conferences. The majority of servers use a small percentage of their CPU potential and are wasteful of power and rack space. Server virtualisation allows us to run many servers on fewer physical hosts.
- Desktop Virtualisation: Often referred to as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Virtual Enterprise Centralised Desktops (VECD), this uses the same core technologies as server virtualisation. Users log into centrally located virtual PC’s instead of physical machines that are expensive to buy and maintain. It also resolves issues around remote data transfer over limited bandwidth and offers new and interesting solutions to long standing business and technology issues.
- Session Virtualisation: The best examples of this technology are Terminal Services and the famous products from Citrix. This allows many users to log into fewer centralised servers instead of desktops. VDI/VECD is different to this because each user gets their own virtual machine, thus using up more server resources that session virtualisation. Session virtualisation has users logging into different sessions on the same server. This means dodgy applications can interfere with other users and simple helpdesk problems become subject to change control because they are server changes.
- Application Virtualisation: This allows applications to be deployed in their own bubble on a server or desktop, either physical or virtual. This simplifies application deployment in complex environments and allows otherwise incompatible software to run on the same computer.
Just like C Infinity, Microsoft’s differentiator is management. There is more to owning a virtualised platform than plugging it in and deploying it. Intelligent deployment, performance and health all must be managed from cradle to grave and from top (applications) to bottom (hardware). Microsoft accomplishes this using their suite of System Center products including:
- Operations Manager 2007: This is deployed by C Infinity to manage both our infrastructure and that of our managed server hosting clients. OpsMgr 2007 automatically monitors the health and performance of hardware, operating systems, virtualisation and applications using expertise provided by the vendors of those products, e.g. HP provides the expertise for the HP hardware. This allows complete management of all items that we can discover on our network. OpsMgr 2007 is aware of the differences between virtual and physical computers.
- Configuration Manager 2007: This is Microsoft’s solution for auditing, deploying and reporting on the infrastructure.
- Virtual Machine Manager 2008: This product was launched yesterday. It will be on the market within 1 month. It includes the ability to centrally deploy virtual machines on Microsoft’s virtualisation platform and to manage their location. VMM 2008 can be integrated with OpsMgr 2007 using Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). This means that virtual machine health, performance, deployment and configuration are integrated into an intelligent solution and at all levels, not just at the virtualisation level. A unique solution is to evaluate the potential of virtualising a physical machine using the metrics gathered by OpsMgr. Depending on the results, you can then use VMM to perform a “P2V” conversion so it is converted into virtual machine, thus saving you money and gaining the benefits of virtualisation.
Why should a virtual machine have less management because it is virtual? It is providing a business solution so it deserves at least the same level of management as a physical machine. In fact, virtualisation offers much more flexibility and agility, so maybe it should have more management. The Microsoft System Center solution caters for this, as does C Infinity.
The core of the new offering from Microsoft is their new virtualisation solution, Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a hypervisor solution, just like Citrix Xen or VMware’s ESX family, that places a very thin piece of software between the hardware and the virtual machine. Hyper-V actually has an almost identical architecture to Xen. In theory, thanks to Intel and AMD’s new CPU architectures, Hyper-V runs beneath the hardware, thus offering the best performance possible. Hyper-V is available on all editions of the 64bit versions of Windows Server 2008. It’s simple to deploy, manage and is proving to already be a hit having been on the market for a few months. In fact, many organisations around the world, and even in Ireland, were running it for production usage even while it was officially a test product. The advantages Hyper-V offer to our clients include:
- Cost reduction: A virtual machine uses fewer resources so the costs are reduced.
- Quicker deployment: A virtual machine is a collection of files. Using templates, we can quickly deploy a VM in a much shorter time frame.
- Agility: Aging hardware is no longer an issue, not that it ever is in C Infinity! We are using the latest servers and storage from HP. But when that time inevitably comes, we can move a VM from one piece of hardware to another without impacting the services the VM provides. This is because the hardware is abstracted, i.e. the VM and its operating system are independent of the hardware.
- Fault tolerance: By clustering our Hyper-V hosts all of our clients who have virtualised servers will have hardware fault tolerance. If a physical server unexpectedly dies, its hosted virtual machines simply restart elsewhere with minimal downtime. C Infinity runs an architecture where there is always sufficient capacity for responding automatically to hardware faults.
- Greener Computing: There is no “green computing” because it’s simply not possible. We can minimise our impact on the environment by reduing the numbers of physical machines that we use and power that we consume. Even if this isn’t a priority for you business, there is no doubthing that environmental taxes are on the way. You can minimise their impact on your business by utilising a shared virtual infrastructure to improve your bottom line.
The emergence of server virtualisation doesn’t mean that the days of the physical server are over. Some things must remain physical such as servers with huge memory, CPU or storage processing requirements. Physical and virtual machines can reside side by side. The same networking and security rules apply to virtual machines as they always have with physical machines.
C Infinity evaluated the best enterprise offerings in the virtualisation market. We place great value in performance, availability and manageability because our clients do. It is for these reasons that we have been working closely with Microsoft on Hyper-V since before it was released. As of now, all of our clients can avail of the virtualised offering that C Infinity provides.
If you would like more information on our services please contact us.
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