Over the years as power costs have soared and data center space has become scarce and expensive
to acquire, enterprises and small businesses have been looking for ways to decrease their data center
footprints as well as reduce the overall costs of operating an IT infrastructure. As the number of
different applications being deployed in data centers grows, efficiency in deployment, management,
and resource consumption is critical. Imagine having to deploy a new piece of physical hardware for
each of these applications—or, even worse, each tier of these applications. Well, that wasn’t too long
ago. Racking, stacking, and installing the OS took a day to complete. The procurement and approval
processes alone took weeks. How did we ever get anything done? Luckily for us, VMware has dramatically
changed the landscape of IT with the vSphere suite of virtualization products.
With the introduction of virtualization into the data center, businesses have sought to virtualize
the infrastructure of their data centers by deploying hosted and bare-metal virtualization products.
It’s a slow process for most companies, but, nonetheless, virtualization is extending its reach
into data centers everywhere, one virtual machine at a time. Over the past few years, virtualization
has gone from being a tool for developers and testers to being the default infrastructure for
many organizations’ IT departments. As we strive to make our processes more efficient, virtualization
just makes sense. Provisioning takes minutes, not days; management can be done through
a single pane of glass, and hardware upgrades—rather, virtual-hardware upgrades—happen
from home on the weekends.
As virtualization becomes more and more common in today’s data centers, businesses are
becoming more comfortable deploying virtualization in production. For systems administrators
who are new to virtualization, the file, print, DHCP, DNS, and small web servers are the lowhanging
fruit. Most systems administrators have been given virtualization initiatives from the
head brass, and these “low-risk, low-utilization” applications are the easy wins. As server hardware
becomes more powerful and applications become more efficient, though, it makes no sense
to deploy a single application on a single piece of physical hardware, even the larger and more
demanding applications. These are usually the tier-1 applications that are considered critical for
the business.
When virtualization technologies were first introduced to enterprise and small/medium
businesses, many thought this new technology would enable them to deploy all of their infrastructure
and business-critical or tier-1 applications on virtualized platforms. When we say tier-1,
we are talking specifically about infrastructure and applications that are critical to a business’s
daily operations. Businesses, including enterprises and small/medium ones, would be severely
crippled without these applications running optimally. However, early virtualization efforts
for these tier-1 applications were not very successful for a variety of reasons. Immaturity of the
virtualization platforms as well as improper planning caused these projects to fail and created a
negative opinion of virtualization in businesses.