By Gail Dutton published: Tuesday, December 04 2007
When NASA first landed a man on the moon, it had to design around risks that included one-sixth gravity and moon dust so abrasive it grinds up seals and tubing. Now that it's planning a lunar base NASA must deal with those same risks, amplified by the expected working lifespan of that base. A few new risks are added, too, including the need to develop ways to uses the moon’s own resources, and the presence of moonquakes that have been measured as high as 5.0 on the Richter scale. NASA considers the risks manageable.
IT operations experience a similar situation as they migrate from physical to virtualized environments. The usual risks of ensuring availability, reliability, security, etc., are still there, but virtualization adds a new dimension. Additional layers – like virtual switches – and new policies that govern virtual placement, sprawl and related issues, also must be considered if the new environment is to be as safe and reliable as the old. These risks, too, are manageable.
“In a virtual environment, everything changes,” insists Aaron Sweemer, director of engineering for disaster recovery firm NTakt7. “The way you think about resource allocation, capacity planning and even how you build solutions changes,” he says. Others see the migration to virtualized environments as more of an evolution than a revolution.
Regardless of how it's viewed, the fact remains, “You’ve put more eggs in one basket,” notes Scott Feuless, senior consultant at Compass America.
Project vs. Strategy
One of the big risks is migrating from physical to virtualized environments is that people tend to think of virtualization as a single project. “That’s a common misperception,” Feuless says. “Managers implement virtualization with perhaps 3:1 gains and find in a year or two they need to do it again.” The difficulty with that approach is that virtualization may be developed in isolation, without considering the broader needs and opportunities within the company. Consequently, key elements may be overlooked in the virtualization process that make the difference between a secure, smoothly functioning system and an unsecured, unstable computing environment.
Managing virtualization as a strategy rather than as a project provides the opportunity to address system-wide issues and options as more of the operation migrates to a virtualized environment and to developing an ongoing plan for migration as the network expands and as needs change. Such a strategy also reduces the need to troubleshoot the system because many of the potential issues were resolved upfront, before the project began.
To successfully manage the risks of virtual or hybrid (virtual and physical) environments, “you have to think through the planning for all the touchpoints,” emphasizes David Link, CEO and cofounder of ScienceLogic. “Everything is connected.”
Therefore, Link advises conducting an initial audit to determine how resources are being used and what should be virtualized. Then, any virtualization strategy should begin with an overall strategy for the entire computing environment that includes both the physical and virtual elements and the linkages between them. Some of the key points in the initial planning assessment should address available resources, peak utilization, peak loads, chargeback strategies, security, storage, and every other aspect of both virtualized and physical servers.
It's important, too, to ensure that standard operating procedures and policies are updated to reflect the changes and opportunities created by a virtual environment, and their long-term implications. For example, new policies may be needed to address who can access the application that controls the virtualized environment, how virtual and physical servers are provisioned in terms of security, and policies for decommissioning virtual servers to minimize server sprawl.
Managing Expertise
At this point, the skill sets to comprehensively implement and manage virtual environments still are somewhat rare, so it's important to get the right team together to build the virtual environment. Because virtualization is still in its early stages, standards, tools, and expertise are still emerging. Even vendors and consultants, who probably have more virtualization experience than most, typically are familiar with only some of the new tools and concerns. Best practices are still emerging. “Therefore, be very careful in your approach,” Link insists.
For USi, an AT&T company, virtualized its hosting platform about one year ago, it realized it needed a single, unified team to handle the migration. So, the company reconfigured its IT operations, integrating its design team, implementation team and operations team into one group. That combined expertise led to the cross-fertilization of expertise and ideas that resulted in a smoothly functioning installation.
Achieving that smooth functionality wasn’t automatic. The groups had different ideas and approaches, so “there was a lot of back and forth,” recalls Christine Schriver, systems engineer, “but that brought the team together.” Perhaps more importantly, it ensured that little was left to chance.
Think in Layers
Virtualization brings significant benefits, but it also adds layers of complexity that don’t exist in the physical environment. Take backup, for example. It's not enough to backup the virtual machines, Schriver explains. Because many virtual servers now reside on a physical server, USi realized it needed to backup not only the virtual servers, but also the physical system and the definitions that govern how those virtualized servers should interact, and how they actually interact. Without that information, a valuable bit of forensic history would be lost.
That need to preserve systems’ operational data is also true for security, but pre-existing security systems or protocols may not be up to the task. As systems are virtualized, managers need to ensure that event logs, audit trails and auditing capabilities are preserved and can be found easily, regardless of where the virtual server is located at any given moment.
“Security is one of the least understood areas in virtualization,” Feuless says. And, compared to physical environments, “There are some differences.” Virtual switches are one example. “Physical switches are configured to be compatible with server policy, and virtual switches need to be managed in the same way as a physical switch,” Link says. But they’re often overlook when policies and procedures are amended, thus offering one potential avenue for a security breach. As he elaborates, “Traditional network defenses are a moot point if you can’t see the network traffic between machines.”
The ease of provisioning servers in a virtual environment is both one of the great benefits and one of the great challenges. The concern is that servers can move very easily among physical boxes without regard for security protocols or before engineers can install appropriate security measures. If everything in the corporation is protected with the same level of security it may not matter, but when companies – think of the defense industry – have security levels may that range from public to top secret, it becomes an issue. To address this, managers need to develop and document a strategy to ensure that virtual servers can only be placed on physical servers with comparable security levels.
Unification
Virtualization managers, like hypervisors, can provide a good look at the virtualized environment, and some consoles can provide an overview of the entire, virtual and physical environment. Such tools can greatly streamline management in virtualized and even some hybrid computing environments.
Similar systems also are becoming available to manage security in virtualized and hybrid environments. “As manufacturers begin to consolidate features onto a unified security platform, virtualization becomes an enabling technology,” according to Neil Henry, product marketing manager for CheckPoint that helps management secure the entire system.
One application, CheckPoint’s own virtualized security gateway, called VPN-1® Power™ VSX, provides security through a virtualized firewall, virtual private networks, and intrusion prevention schemes. Streamlined management capabilities include dynamic routing support and the ability to operate in bridge mode. It can handle up to 250 virtual security systems on one hardware platform.
Applications that provide a view of the complete virtualized and physical computing environment are making security management almost aerodynamic, but they also add a security risk. Guest operating systems, for example, can be established so quickly, the security team may not even know about them, much less apply the proper security filters. That failure could leave an opening in your defenses.
Additionally, this consolidation of virtual servers means that anyone with access to the virtualization manager can access the entire system and its data. That risk can be mitigated by understanding and managing the level at which hypervisors provide host drivers to guest operating systems. It seems obvious, but is worth stating: security strategies must limit access to those who need the access.
Capacity
Understanding peak utilization trends becomes even more important in virtualized environments than in physical ones because so many more servers are competing for resources. To better manage utilization, Schriver says, “We automate events gathering, and perform trends analysis regarding usage, provisioning, new equipment to provide on-demand capacity to clients.”
Capacity planning is a blend of virtualized and physical elements. Simply adding virtualized servers to a physical server isn’t sufficient. For example, Sweemer recalls one client who virtualized his system to find that one very active virtual server gobbled up resources needed by others, causing widespread service disruptions. Troubleshooting at the virtual level didn’t help. Adjusting servers’ physical configurations, however, resolved the competition for resources and allowed each machine to operate optimally.
Combating Sprawl
Another challenge of virtualized environments lies in knowing what’s where. “You can spin up a virtual server in a few minutes, so virtualization can get out of hand,” notes Brian Bouterse, networking and systems specialist for The Friday Institute at North Carolina State University, which was formed to research, develop and disseminate innovative ideas and practices to advance education.
In schools, Bouterse explains, teachers may request certain virtual resources for a given lesson, without decommissioning those resources when the lesson is completed. The situation exists in business, too. The result is needless server sprawl that clutters up systems and convolutes their management. A solution, he suggests, is to develop and broadcast policies for decommissioning virtual machines.
Disaster Recovery
For disaster recovery, virtualization is a tool adds the opportunity to use grids to adjust loads and virtually reposition computing resources. In disasters, the risks of virtualized environments aren’t different, but are more intense, Sweemer opines.
In any environment, the big concern during disaster recovery is that the data is intact. That’s followed closely by accessibility. (Most U.S. executives expect to resume normal operations within 24 hours of a disaster. IT execs know that three days is more likely, according to an oft-quoted 2003 study by EMC/ROPER ASW.)
Virtualization, however, moves recovery closer to business exec’s expectations. By leveraging economies of scale and the ability to quickly move virtual servers offsite, companies maintain intact data and perhaps 80 or 90 percent of their computing capacity at one third of the cost of physically duplicating the physical computing environment, Sweemer says.
Virtualization, like NASA’s planned lunar base, is not without risks. Effectively managing those risks, however, can create an extraordinarily effective enterprise.
Gail Dutton is a veteran business and technology writer. Her articles appear in DCM, Genetic Engineering News, World Trade and other publications. She can be reached at gaildutton@gmail.com.
