Low-Cost P2V Tools and Backups Let Physical Production Environments Take Advantage of Virtualized Disaster Recovery
We’ve all heard the numbers surrounding the environmental impact of expanding datacenters. The simple fact is that as servers become more powerful, they require more power to operate. The heat generated by more and faster processors also requires more power to cool. Modern datacenters house thousands of these severs in a single location, casting a massive environmental shadow. Larger datacenters, such as Microsoft’s newest in rural Washington, consume more power than the rest of the town in which they are located.
As a nation, we’ve combated the towering smokestacks of steel and paper mills during the Industrial Revolution, cleaned the lakes and rivers polluted by unchecked dumping during the last half of the 20th Century, and currently are working to reduce or eliminate the harmful emissions from our beloved motor vehicles. While certainly none of these previous problems has been completely eliminated, awareness has been raised and steps taken to correct the mistakes of our past. Signs are now pointing to energy consumption as the next great environmental problem.
Those of us in the industry recognize the need to address this issue, not just from an environmental perspective, but from a business perspective as well. After all, all of that energy comes from somewhere, and comes at a hefty price. Recent years have seen the rebirth of an old technology, aimed directly at reducing the sprawl of physical boxes in the modern datacenter. I speak, of course, of virtualization.
The “virtualize the datacenter” article has been written a hundred times, and for good reason. The value is unquestioned and the technology has long been proven. But the reality is that a virtualization project requires architecture, planning, testing, budget approval, and then the final implementation. The whole process from start to finish can take well over a year, even once the decision to virtualize has been made. As we know, this is not always a given.
There are a multitude of reasons that a given enterprise may choose NOT to virtualize their environment. Perhaps they don’t trust the “new” technology and want to wait for the market to stabilize. It’s possible they’ve just made a sizeable investment in their infrastructure and lack the required budget for a new project. It may be that they have virtualized some of their servers, but have a residual amount of machines that simply aren’t good candidates for virtualization. What can these companies do to “save the world,” and save a few bucks in the process?
P2V D/R
Whatever the reasons are that have caused an organization to NOT virtualize their production environment may not apply to their D/R environment. While everyone would like to architect their Disaster Recovery site to be a duplicate of their production environment, the reality of running a business sometimes gets in the way.
With the release of low cost P2V tools and backup software that offers P2V backups, the ability to maintain a physical production environment while taking advantage of the lower costs and increased flexibility of virtualized D/R is now a much more appealing solution. With a P2V backup tool, you can create an image level backup of a running physical machine, and then have the ability to restore the entire image (OS, configurations, and data) to a Virtual Machine with just a few mouse clicks. Compare this to the normal process of rebuilding the server, installing the backup agent, then restoring the data from tape. Add to this the fact that multiple servers can run on one physical box, and the case for P2V D/R becomes quite compelling.
Think Outside The Box (and Datacenter)
The case has well been made for datacenter virtualization, but what about the rest of the world? The use of virtual machines is quickly being championed by developers and QA staff and support personnel around the globe. The ability to have an easily accessible library of a multitude of images that can be modified and quickly reverted to their original state eliminates the need for multiple physical machines that would normally occupy the support and test labs. While these don’t have the same power and cooling requirements of an average datacenter, they do consume a substantial amount of energy that can be eliminated by the use of virtual machines.
There are, of course, other benefits to the use of virtual machines besides the reduced power consumption. If properly optimized, VMs are easily transportable to remote colleagues. Utilities exist to allow for virtual appliances to be created from Linux or Windows that eliminate the need for extensive configurations and allow for VM snapshots or differencing disks to become transportable packages. With this type of flexibility, the use of virtual machines allows teams to more easily collaborate across distances. This makes teams more efficient, which naturally increases productivity.
Virtualize What?
Although a bit slower in adoption than the typical server virtualization, the virtualization of storage devices shows the same promise. Both address excess capacity, centralized management, and the elimination of hardware dependency. The key to storage virtualization from an energy standpoint (as well as capacity standpoint) is efficiency. By presenting a virtualized storage environment, the unutilized portions of each storage device can be logically combined into a useable “device.” While this technology is clearly designed to maximize storage capacity (and storage budgets), the same principal applies to energy consumption. If a storage device is only 80% utilized, then 20% of the energy consumed by that device is wasted. By reclaiming wasted storage, the amount of wasted energy is reduced.
Clearly, energy consumption is not the main driver in the virtualization movement, but it is definitely part of the picture. With the increased awareness of datacenter energy consumption coinciding with rising energy costs, any decision to virtualize (or not to) would be incomplete without considering the environmental and financial benefits that the reduced energy consumption offers.
Scott Polly is the Director of Product Management at Vizioncore. Founded in 2002, Vizioncore Inc. is the leading provider of innovative dynamic backup, performance monitoring, migration and replication software that enhances virtual infrastructure. Scott has over 10 years experience in the IT industry, most recently managing global projects for IBM and Zurich Financial Services.
