How to Manage VMs With a Server Consolidation Plan

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1 TechTarget Data Center Media E-Guide Control sprawl in your virtual server infrastructure As businesses expand their server virtualization deployments, they often run into challenges in terms of scaling and managing their growing virtual infrastructure. In this expert E-Guide, brought to you by SearchServerVirtualization.com and HP, you will learn how to successfully reduce virtual server sprawl in your organization. Discover how to effectively track and manage virtual machines to minimize sprawl in a fast-growing deployment. Explore how to develop an effective server consolidation plan to reduce underutilization and gain insight into best practices for limiting VM sprawl in your business. Sponsored By:

2 Table of Contents Control sprawl in your virtual server infrastructure E-Guide Table of Contents: Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments Create a server consolidation plan to avoid sprawl Virtual machine sprawl prevention: Best practices About HP Page 2 of 10

3 Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments Jeff Byrne, Contributor In their early stages, most server consolidation projects yield favorable results, but customers find that server consolidation benefits don't always translate into larger installations. As users expand virtualization deployments, they often encounter obstacles in terms of scaling and manually managing virtual infrastructure. In this discussion, we explain how this central virtualization management challenge develops, how manual methods to track and manage virtual machines (VMs) become problematic in a fast-growing deployment, and some virtualization management tools that can minimize the problems of sprawl. Phases of virtual infrastructure implementation Organizations that invest in virtualization move through four phases of deployment that are characterized by certain qualities and problems. During these phases, the value to an organization grows, but so do virtualization's management challenges (see Table 1). Table 1: The four phases of virtual infrastructure deployment Page 3 of 10

4 Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments Server sprawl and management issues Despite IT's efforts to anticipate and control virtual server sprawl, the ease of cloning virtual machines (VMs) can cause them to multiply. Many organizations have discovered that when a server becomes virtual, it becomes more difficult to identify and track. Based on the Taneja Group's discussions with vendors and end users, more than 50% of companies suffer from serious bouts of sprawl during the first year of server consolidation initiatives. Unlike the flu, server sprawl cannot be shaken off easily. Following an initial wave of server consolidation, enthusiasm often sets in as organizations discover how easily they can deploy new VMs. But even when only a small number of people can create VMs, virtual servers can proliferate throughout an organization if left unchecked. Sprawl has a serious side effect: As virtual machines propagate, organizations lack governance policies to configure these VMs. In the absence of standards, users and administrators configure virtual machines on spec, often overallocating resources to VMs, which creates waste and inefficiency. This problem is exacerbated in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), in which large volumes of VMs are often created over a short period of time. Managing VMs with manual processes How do most IT organizations manage VM sprawl? Not surprisingly, they tend to turn to tools and processes with which they're familiar. Most administrators, for example, use traditional spreadsheets to track and manage virtual servers. Administrators log information such as VM owner, resources allocated, approved usage and lease period to track an organization's total number of VMs and their workloads. While a traditional spreadsheet is a temporary management solution, most administrators can't keep up with VM additions and changes in a growing virtualization deployment. What happens when a developer creates a new virtual machine for testing purposes and then moves it to a test environment? What happens when the same developer moves the test VM back to the general population? When virtual machine migration tools like VMware VMotion enter the mix, manual tracking can become even more difficult. One IT administrator reported that although he spent a vast amount of his time tracking VMs, his Excel spreadsheets were woefully out of date. As an organization expands its virtual infrastructure, a manual approach to tracking and managing VMs suffers from error and inefficiency. Even when spreadsheet data is current, it's usually only accessible to one or two administrators. Even faithfully executed manual processes such as these are doomed to fail in a rapidly growing virtualized environment. As a result, management and operational costs soar because of highly inefficient administrative processes and the suboptimal allocation of system resources. Embotics Corp., a virtualization lifecycle management vendor, has modeled and measured the typical costs of virtual server sprawl. Based on its findings from end users, the costs of sprawl can offset an organization's savings from server consolidation. Fortunately, new products are poised to enter the market to help virtual server administrators better cope with the growing pains of virtual infrastructure deployments. Marketed as virtual infrastructure management, lifecycle Page 4 of 10

5 Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments management, policy-based management or orchestration applications, these products go beyond the capabilities of hypervisor element managers to solve many of the problems associated with fast-growing virtualization environments. Controlling server sprawl with VM lifecycle management Virtual infrastructure management products help to address virtual server sprawl by enabling users to produce well-defined processes for provisioning new VMs. With these products, only authorized administrators can create and provision new virtual servers. Page 5 of 10

6 Create a server consolidation plan to avoid sprawl Create a server consolidation plan to avoid sprawl Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Writer Make sure you have a server consolidation plan in place in order to help prevent server sprawl. Businesses have historically faced problems from server sprawl and underutilization. Once a new application has been adopted, it's assigned to a server in the data center. That server, however, is rarely used at any more than 5% to 10% of its computing capacity, which results in the proliferation of power-hungry systems that aren't working up to their full potential. Server virtualization dramatically changes this paradigm in that it allows numerous virtual machines (VMs) to coexist and run on the same physical servers. That can vastly reduce hardware needs and environmental requirements. Establishing a server consolidation plan is easy and offers many benefits, but making the consolidation work correctly can be a challenge. One immediate benefit of optimizing server consolidation is that you'll use fewer physical servers. That, in turn, reduces the data center's capital hardware costs and space requirements and lowers collateral costs of power and cooling systems. There is often a compelling return on investment argument with these factors alone. However, since there are fewer hardware devices that could fail, maintenance costs can also be kept in check. Fewer physical servers also means fewer costly annual service contracts to pay. You can reallocate older servers displaced in a technology update to other less critical tasks, extending the hardware's useful life. And it's easier to standardize on management tools when there are fewer servers. These benefits -- together with the tools used for VM management -- can facilitate data center management. A successful server consolidation plan can also mitigate the need to add staff as the data center grows. Perhaps the most overlooked and often understated benefit of a server consolidation plan is enhanced flexibility. A VM is basically a file that can be moved and copied between servers and storage systems. An administrator can create and configure a new VM from a basic image in minutes. Similarly, you can migrate a working VM to a more powerful server or copy it to backup storage at a disaster recovery site -- usually without disrupting the machine or its users. Hardware failure and overgrowth One of the most obvious risks with server consolidation is hardware failure. In a traditional environment, a server fault would affect the application and users running on that physical server. However, a server failure in a virtual environment can disable all VMs that reside on it. While techniques like server clustering help maintain high availability (HA), that practice is usually reserved for mission-critical VMs and often leaves secondary VMs on a single server. Consequently, administrators must track VM distribution across the enterprise to ensure that important VMs are running on adequate HA hardware. It's equally Page 6 of 10

7 Create a server consolidation plan to avoid sprawl important to arrange backup cycles that meet the recovery point objective and recovery time objective for each VM. A proliferation of virtual machines will also affect server virtualization. Just as conventional data centers faced problems with server sprawl, the ease and speed of creating new VMs can precipitate similar conditions as administrators quickly deploy a new VM for each new application or task. "It's often referred to as 'VM sprawl,' but it's usually just a symptom of other machine management problems within an organization," said Bob Plankers, a technology consultant and blogger for The Lone Sysadmin. He noted that adequate planning and management tools are important to mitigate sprawl. VM sprawl can easily lead to software licensing violations and can further complicate maintenance, since there is no direct link between an application's VM and the underlying physical server. While this abstraction is a desirable feature of virtualization, it can have undesirable consequences for careless administrators. A final issue that often goes unnoticed is VM assignment. Although a virtual machine should function on any suitable piece of hardware, it might not be prudent to combine certain VMs, depending on their resource demands. "Server consolidation isn't a good solution for all applications," said Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, a solution provider in Oakland, Calif. Morimoto noted that demanding database applications can be problematic when virtualized and may cause performance problems when consolidated with other VMs on the same server. Page 7 of 10

8 Virtual machine sprawl prevention: Best practices Virtual machine sprawl prevention: Best practices Anil Desai, site expert Many organizations have used virtualization to help reduce server sprawl: an overabundance of servers in their environments. Deploying virtual machines (VMs) willy-nilly, however, can lead to VM sprawl, defeating the purpose of virtualizating the servers. In this tip, I present some best practices for managing VMs to prevent VM sprawl. Server sprawl is caused, in most cases, by systems administrators deploying a new computer just to support a lightweight Web application or a simple workload that could easily have been placed on another server. In other cases, the proliferation was unavoidable, as some applications and services don't play nicely with others on the same machine. What causes virtual machine sprawl? Virtualization technology can help resolve the latter problem by allowing multiple independent workloads to run on the same computer at the same time. The process of deploying a new VM can be performed in a matter of minutes, thereby reducing costs and administrative effort. That ease of deployment also makes it easy to end up with more VMs than you can manage, otherwise known as VM sprawl. IT organizations often find themselves tasked with keeping track of dozens or hundreds of new VMs seemingly overnight. When considering security, performance, reliability, and adhering to IT standards, the task of managing virtual systems can quickly become overwhelming. Here are some ways to reduce some of the headaches. Virtual machine deployment The first step in managing VM sprawl is related to reigning in the deployment of new VMs. Just because end-users and systems administrators have the ability to deploy new virtual machines does not mean that they should. IT departments should define a process for the deployment of a new VM. Figure 1 (below) provides a basic example of some typical steps. Often, the suggestion of a process conjures up an image of a small army of pointy-haired bosses creating a new bureaucracy. In reality, it's certainly possible to perform all of the steps in a process such as this in a matter of minutes. Figure 1: Possible steps in a VM deployment process. Best Practice: IT departments should remain involved in all virtual machine deployments. Configuration management Another problem related to the widespread deployment of VMs is a lack of configuration consistency. Since users can choose from a wide array of operating systems and applications to run within a VM, the number of variations can grow exponentially. Additionally, the VMs that are deployed may not adhere to IT standards and guidelines for security and other settings. Page 8 of 10

9 Virtual machine sprawl prevention: Best practices One way to minimize these effects is for IT organizations to create a standardized set of base images in what is often referred to as a VM library. Users should be required to begin the creation of a new VM using one of these images. Figure 2 (below) provides some examples of types of VM images that might be created. Figure 2: Examples of virtual machine images that might be available in a VM library. While developing a list of standard configurations can help reduce the number of configurations that are supported, IT staff should still remember the need to verify configurations before deployment into a production environment. Best Practice: All users and systems administrators should base their deployments on IT-approved base images and supported configurations. Keeping virtual machines up-to-date An important concern for all deployments both physical and virtual is keeping systems up-to-date. Security patches and application upgrades can help minimize the risk of reliability and data loss. The good news is that IT organizations can depend on their standard patch and update deployment tools for managing virtual machines. Of course, this will only be possible if the guest OS (operating system) is supported by those tools (another good reason for implementing configuration management). Best Practice: Treat productions VMs as if they were physical machines, and ensure that they are monitored and updated regularly. Contain yourself (and your virtual machines)! If you're responsible for limiting VM sprawl in your environment, you know that it's important to give users what they want. Reducing deployment times and providing access to virtualization functionality can positively impact productivity while minimizing data center impacts. By keeping IT departments involved in deployment decisions, and making sure that VMs are properly managed, organizations can enjoy these benefits without suffering from unmitigated VM sprawl. Page 9 of 10

10 About HP About HP About HP HP is a technology company with 321,000 employees operating in more than 170 countries. HP is the second-largest technology services company in the world. For 69 years, HP has helped people, businesses, and communities around the world simplify technology experiences. HP's three business groups drive industry leadership in core technology areas: The Personal Systems Group (business and consumer PCs and devices); The Imaging and Printing Group (printing, digital photography and entertainment); The Technology Solutions Group (business products). HP is a global leader in blade servers and distributed system management software. HP is among the world's largest IT companies; with revenue totaling $118.4 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended October 31, In 2008, HP was number 14 on the Fortune 500 list. The company's corporate headquarters are located in Palo Alto, California. Page 10 of 10