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ISN’s technical consultants have put their heads together and come up with some practical advice for IT teams considering introducing virtualisation.

1 - Start small and work up

So that you and your team can familiarise yourselves with the concepts and issues around virtualisation, start with free or inexpensive tools like #Citrix #XenServer, #VMware ESX3i or VMware Workstation.

Try For your first production systems try running simple server workloads like Blackberry Enterprise Server, DHCP or secondary domain controllers.

2 - Take a phased approach

Don’t try to do everything all at once. Trying to do too much in one step is a recipe for downtime and disaster. Specialist consultancies can provide the tools and expertise to help you plan the best way to get to your desired end results.

3 - Don’t expect to be able to virtualise all of your systems

Sometimes you are better off with physical servers. Direct attached storage in the form of RAID arrays on an intelligent caching disk controllers will often give better performance for high throughput databases than virtual machines accessing shared iSCSI storage.

4 - Check compatibility of existing software applications

Confirm with vendors that their applications are supported on virtual machines and consider their recommendations when looking at server, network and backup options.

5 - Don’t forget about licensing

Remember OEM licenses are tied to the hardware they were bought with, so that you can’t simply convert a machine running OEM software and stay compliant. Each virtual Windows server or desktop would need its own operating system license - either volume or retail box.

6 - Think about backup and recovery up front

Although it is easier to back up and restore, a production virtual machine needs a proper rigorous backup regime in place to allow quick recovery from data loss. Choose products which are designed for virtual systems such as those from Vizioncore or Symantec.

7 - Upgrade hardware warranty

When you are running multiple production virtual machines on one physical server system, this become vital as any downtime is compounded. For HP servers ISN recommend 24/7 6 hour Call-to-repair or 4 hour response Carepack warranty extensions. Dell too offer a “4 hour Mission Critical” response add-on to their basic warranty.

8 - Build a solid foundation for the future

Don’t try to skimp and put your first production virtual machines on a low-end system as this will generally become your production environment before you know it. Hardware is cheap compared to the cost, disruption and inconvenience of rebuilding. There is also a cost to eroding users’ confidence in new systems by providing it on under-powered hardware. Choose reliable, fast server hardware with redundancy built in.

9 - Use shared storage for more flexibility

For non critical server workloads with very little data it is feasible to keep the data within the virtual machine. To get the most out of a virtual environment, realising the full benefits of disaster recovery, resilience, flexibility and performance, it is best to separate critical production data and locate it on a shared Storage Area Network (SAN) or high end Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.

10 - Plan network capacity for best performance

ISN use iSCSI or fibre channel accelerators in servers attached to a separate storage LAN with a dedicated switch fabric to guarantee fastest data access times and throughput between servers, shared storage and users. If your server uses the same LAN for iSCSI access to a SAN as it does to serve data to users, problems can arise.

11 - Use outside expertise to give you a head start

It can save a lot of time and money to use an experienced consultancy to get you started on your virtualisation project. ISN’s qualified consultants can help you get results fast and transfer practical skills to your own IT team.

If you have any questions about virtualisation or how it might work in your business, please leave a comment or call me at ISN on 020 7313 9900.

Cloud computing is one of this year’s hot topics. In a nutshell, it means locating your computing resources somewhere else, usually in a data centre run by a hosting company.

Many businesses are hoping that cloud computing will be a panacea to solve all the problems that appear to come from their computer room and all those troublesome servers.

However, even if your servers are located at some third party hosting site and managed by people who don’t work for you, those pesky problems may still occur and the overall costs may be less than owning and running your own servers.

Consultants from McKinsey & Co have produced a report which shows that moving your computing to the cloud could be a costly mistake. The McKinsey study, entitled “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing” claims that outsourcing a typical data centre to the cloud could even double costs!

The report goes on to say that businesses could do better by running their own servers and using virtualisation to run them more efficiently. This approach may indeed hold the key to greater cost savings.

We at ISN tend to agree. While neither cloud computing or virtualisation will cure all corporate IT headaches, there is a place for both and, used to fulfill definite objectives, both can provide cost savings and better performing IT for businesses.

For instance, certain tedious but crucial tasks, like spam and virus filtering can be transferred to “the cloud” in the form of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for an insignificant cost and can deliver quick returns in terms of increased productivity and better security.

Similarly, our LiveVault online backup solution is a cloud-based application, which creates backups off site every 15 minutes at far less cost than an in-house solution could.

The cloud is fine for utility jobs like these, but the same approach doesn’t work so well for business critical applications where tighter control, flexibility and integration with other systems are high priorities. Costs of owning hardware are low in reality since they can be depreciated over several years or even written off against tax. Most organisations are having to get leaner in the way they use IT and server virtualisation is a clear way of squeezing more value out of your data centre.

We would welcome your opinions on this topic. Please leave a comment or email us.

 

How do you acheive your business goals without spending more?

Cutting costs ruthlessly is easy but to damage your productivity will lose you revenue

Over the past 10 years ISN Solutions have helped hundreds of businesses and organisations of all kinds get the most from their IT spend. We’d like to hear from you about the IT challenges you face in your work - we think we can help.

In the meantime, here are three ways our current clients are getting more from their IT investment:

1 - Reduce the number of servers you run

This London web publishing company made savings in power, office space, IT support and gave better service to their customers.
Find out more >>

2 - Allow your staff to work from anywhere

An easy route to savings in office space while increasing productivity and business flexibility. Here’s how a financial recruitment specialist benefited during the recent snow
Find out more >>

3 - Network rationalisation

Get more out of existing Internet and WAN links and faster data access. This property company got £20k pa value from a one off £7k spend
Find out more >>

If you are interested in exploring what we can do to help, you can contact me on 020 7313 9900 or add a comment to this post.