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Page 1 of 2 The Impact of Virtualization on the IT Infrastructure By Symantec published: Friday, November 14 2008
Server virtualization is experiencing rapid adoption, with double-digit
growth over the past two years setting a pattern for similar expectations through
this year and beyond. After all, virtualization is a promising business tool,
helping organizations not only improve hardware resource utilization but also
consolidate physical servers and enhance application availability.
Restore Exactly What They Need
When planning virtualization initiatives, it is imperative
to look beyond physical servers to consider the impact virtualization will have
on the entire IT infrastructure, including backup and storage. By following
best practices for implementing data protection and storage management
strategies, organizations can be sure their IT environment is positioned to
contribute to business success today and tomorrow.
Altered States
While many elements of IT environments are relatively
unchanged by virtualization, others-such as data protection and storage-are
significantly altered. In fact, according to survey respondents at Storage
Networking World in April 2008, backup and recovery and storage management are
the top challenges in virtualized environments.
Simply stated, standard backup technologies that have been
used for years in physical environments create significant overhead when
applied to a virtual world. In addition, because it adds a layer of
abstraction, virtualization also makes storage more challenging by obfuscating
visibility into the IT environment even as it increases the amount of storage
to be managed.
At the same time, consideration must also be given to
heterogeneous server virtualization support. With several virtualization tools now
available, the heterogeneity for which physical IT infrastructures have become
known will almost certainly extend to virtual environments as well as
organizations deploy multiple hypervisors from a variety of vendors across x86
and non-x86 systems.
Needless to say, as virtualization becomes a critical part
of their production environments, IT organizations must ensure that they
continue to have the same level of data protection, recovery, visibility, and
storage across their entire IT infrastructure, regardless of its physical or
virtual composition. To do that, IT must be able to use the same integrated set
of management tools for their virtual machines as they rely on for their
physical components.
With such a toolset in place, organizations will be able to
take advantage of promising technologies such as virtualization while also
maximizing their current and future IT investments.
Protecting Data
In today's information-driven, IT-based environments, data
is now considered a company's most valuable asset. As such, information-from an
entire volume to a single file-requires constant protection against loss.
Regardless of whether the data is on a physical or a virtual server,
information must be protected and remain available.
All FromThe Same Management Tool
The trouble is, while a single physical server may have the
capacity to complete a backup job, backing up a server with multiple virtual
machines distributed across it will likely impact the performance of the entire
environment.
Best practices for addressing this issue include either
using an on-host backup or off-host backup solution. With on-host backup,
wherein client software is installed inside each virtual machine or on the
virtual service console, implementation is essentially the same as with
physical machine backups. The most advanced on-host backup tools provide data
deduplication capabilities that reduce the amount of backed up data by as much
as 95 percent, which in turn reduces backup time and processor overhead.
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