Virtualization's Impact on IT Operations - Part One

By Kevin Lees
published: Wednesday, May 28 2008

Virtualization's Impact on IT Operations - Part 1

Virtualization continues to be recognized as sufficiently mature for deployment in production environments. In fact, I would say it's either rapidly approaching or has already arrived at the "knee in the curve." The coming years will see an exponential increase in virtualized production environments as it passes this bend and begins its, what I believe will be, rapid climb up the steep part of the deployment curve.

What will influence how rapidly virtualization technologies are deployed in production? Certainly its increasing technical maturity will have a huge impact. For anyone who has attended VMworld or who takes regular notice of virtualization industry announcements, there should be little doubt that the advancements we see in virtualization's core technology (for instance, hardware assisted virtualization) as well as in supporting solutions (like VMware's Storage Motion, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager or Citrix's XenCenter and XenMotion) will continue unabated. But, will the maturity of virtualization's technologies and supporting solutions alone drive the steepness of the deployment curve? If not, what else might influence how rapidly virtualization is deployed in production environments? In my opinion, it will be IT Operations. This series of articles will look at virtualization's impact on IT Operations. This first article discusses the advantages virtualization offers to IT Operations. The second article will address the IT Operations' challenges presented by virtualization and the current state of available tools to address these challenges. The final article in the series will consider virtualization's impact on IT Operations from an ITIL perspective.

Today, IT Operations is primarily about Service Level Management, well, and of course controlling the costs required to meet those agreed to service levels. Pretty much everything IT Operations does it does to maintain and improve the level of service it provides to other departments within the company or externally to the company's customers. Given this, let's look at how virtualization can positively impact service levels.

Virtualization can positively impact service levels in several ways, some obvious, perhaps some not so obvious. The most obvious, and most heavily promoted, is undoubtedly disaster recovery. Hardware independence and the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single target server, even if production servers aren't virtualized, can make for faster recovery. This is especially beneficial for companies that can't afford duplicate production servers or rely on third party providers offering shared disaster recovery facilities. If, on the other hand, production servers are virtualized, Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives can potentially be improved through the use of virtual machine snapshots, coupled, of course, with storage replication. All of this leads to improved disaster recovery service levels.

While disaster recovery is one of the most accepted and most widely written about advantages of virtualization for IT Operations relative to improved service levels, what I really want to explore are perhaps some less obvious, but potentially as impactful, applications of virtualization. One of the most exciting, coming from someone who was involved in IT Operations management at an application service provider, addresses the process that should ideally exist after a software release exits test and development (or a new application or application update is brought in from a third party) but before it's deployed into production - the operations' readiness process.

The operations' readiness process allows IT Operations' personnel to familiarize themselves with, test and certify the production deployment readiness of a software release (as in operating system patch, new third-party application/application update, or internal release) in a production-like environment. Therein lies the rub. More often than not, hardware costs preclude the required, production-like environment (Operations' Readiness Lab) needed to test readiness with any effectiveness. In an x86-based production environment virtualization makes creating the Operations' Readiness Lab much more affordable, and hence much more realizable. Use of a virtualized Operations Readiness Lab will increase your rate of success when releasing software into production and lower the risk of planned downtime extending beyond that specified in a Service Level Agreement.

While on the subject of deploying software releases into production, how relieved will your administrators be, in a virtualized production environment, when a release into production involves deploying a previously tested and certified (via your recently created virtualized Operations Readiness Lab) virtual machine? Not to mention if, heaven forbid, there is a problem with the release in production and "rolling back" involves restarting the previous virtual machine instead of backing the release out of a physical production server? I have, unfortunately, been through releases that lasted six hours on a Friday night instead of two due to having to back out a release. I, for one, believe the relief the administrators, not to mention myself, would have felt if we were faced with restarting the original virtual machine instead of backing the release out of a physical server would have been palpable - not to mention how it would have relieved the pressure on planned downtime for the month!

Another area of positive impact on IT Operations for which virtualization shows promise is zero-downtime backups. Basically, the challenge addressed by zerodowntime backups is one in which an application, predominately a database, must be quiesced prior to backup in order to avoid data loss due to write requests being dropped. In order to ensure that all write requests are flushed prior to the backup, the application must be taken offline. Currently, one tool, at least, begins to address this. VMware's Consolidated Backup provides for virtual machine activity to be captured in a redo log while a snapshot of the virtual machine is taken. Once the snapshot is complete, the redo log is "played" to the running virtual machine ensuring that no virtual machine activity was lost while the snapshot was being made. This sequence of events provides zero-downtime backup of the virtual machine. Granted, this may be a stretch for a database of any consequence, for which placement in a virtual machine is debatable anyway, hence why I wrote virtualization holds promise for zero-downtime backups. As virtualization improves, though, with technologies such as hardware-assisted virtualization, I can foresee a time when zero-downtime backups of databases in a virtual machine could become a reality for IT Operations'.

One final area I want to touch on, in which virtualization has a positive impact on IT Operations, is application deployment in response to changing business needs.

To stay competitive, successful businesses must be able to rapidly respond to changing market conditions or, depending on the business, a customer request. Traditionally, a gating factor for how quickly IT Operations could respond to a business unit's need for rolling out a new application in response to a customer request, a competitor or a market change was hardware provisioning. Today, by making use of virtual machine "golden templates", a functioning virtual machine, certified at least to the operating system level, can be up and running in 15 to 30 minutes. Now, this in itself presents both an upside and a downside to IT Operations, the potential downside being virtual machine sprawl but I'll save that for the second article in this series where I'll look at the challenges virtualization presents to IT Operations.

The virtualization advantages I describe in this article are based on my experience in pre-virtualization IT Operations at an ASP. With the exception of the Operations Readiness Lab, which we were fortunate enough to have a physical version of, my team would have directly benefitted from the positive impact of a virtualized environment. Meeting the planned downtime component of our customer Service Level Agreements would have definitely been less stressful. But, virtualization also presents challenges to IT Operations. Fortunately, tools are and continue to become available to begin addressing these challenges. I'll look at this aspect of virtualization's impact on IT Operations in the next article in this series.

PMP'n Part One, PMP'n Part Two