WHITE PAPER. Automating the Virtual Datacenter

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Automating the Virtual Datacenter

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary Business Agility: The Promise and the Challenge... 3 Driving Business Agility and ROI through Virtual Datacenter Automation... 3 VMware Infrastructure: A Strategic Platform for the Datacenter... 4 How VMware Changes Systems Management and Enables Automation... 4 The Key Requirements for Virtualization in the Automated Datacenter Automating Critical IT Processes in the Virtual Datacenter What is IT Service Delivery?... 5 Tracking and Controlling Virtual Machines throughout Their Lifecycle... 6 Bringing Automation to the Lab Release Management at the Speed of Software... 7 Automating Business Continuity... 8 The Challenges of Traditional Business Continuity... 8 How VMware Changes Everything for Business Continuity... 8 Business Continuity with VMware: Rapid, Reliable, Manageable Conclusion: The New Automated Virtual Datacenter

3 Executive Summary IT organizations are under significant pressure to create, deliver and maintain flexible IT services that enable the business to respond quickly to changing business conditions. This growing need to support business agility requires a more dynamic, automated datacenter infrastructure. The existing physical infrastructure is difficult to automate, mired in complex dependencies and manual tasks. VMware virtualization provides a reliable, flexible platform that makes it possible to leverage existing infrastructure while eliminating hardware dependencies and creating dynamic, standardized software containers that can be moved and changed on demand. By eliminating the dependencies on physical infrastructure, the once-elusive goal of automation and business agility becomes possible. This whitepaper discusses how customers can leverage VMware to achieve greater business agility. Business Agility: The Promise and the Challenge Businesses face increasing pressures from rapid changes in the global marketplace, as well as regulatory and compliance requirements, yet must keep capital and operational costs under control. It is critical for these organizations to react quickly to market conditions, new opportunities or competitive threats. On the other hand, they also must ensure that business goals are achieved in line with tightening budgets and in compliance with proliferating financial, industry or environmental regulations. Business agility is where responsiveness and flexibility meet risk mitigation and strict compliance in other words, the ability to turn on a dime while maintaining an accurate record of what changed where and for what reason, all while ensuring that IT services are available 24/7. Business agility is not a new concept. Enterprises and technology vendors have pursued the ideal of a more agile IT infrastructure for over 10 years. However, in reality achieving business agility is not as straightforward as it may seem particularly for IT organizations, which are often caught between the opposing objectives of flexibility and control. IT organizations must increasingly anticipate changes in the business and respond quickly to requests for new or improved IT services, all while meeting service level expectations and shielding critical systems from undue risk. Adding to this complexity is the complexity of the systems themselves. For example, the typical implementation of an enterprise application such as SAP can require upwards of 50 servers to support the production environment and preproduction or maintenance activities. The process of changing, maintaining and protecting such mission-critical applications is slow, painstaking and complex. According to Forrester Research, Today, IT spends about 75% of its budget on the ongoing operations and maintenance of IT. 1 lications are typically dependent on very specific hardware configurations. Minor changes to device drivers, storage or network configurations, or the introduction of a patch to a system or application can require extensive testing. Even then, configuration drift between development, test and production systems can introduce unforeseen problems. Restoring or migrating applications to new systems can consume weeks of precious time and resources, and delay delivery of the new system to the business. Further, business-critical systems are often inadequately protected against system and sitewide failures or disasters. To the extent that systems are protected, the recovery process is manual, painstaking and prone to failure it can take weeks to fully recover them to a failover datacenter. The result is a costly trade-off: IT organizations can either sacrifice control and predictability to accommodate the business need for rapid change, or they can impose strict control through process bureaucracy thereby sacrificing responsiveness to the business. Until recently, existing technologies have proven inadequate to allow IT departments to rise to that challenge and mitigate these trade-offs. Driving Business Agility and ROI through Virtual Datacenter Automation The promise of business agility is realized through a strategic datacenter platform that enables IT to execute successfully on these conflicting objectives: enabling rapid change, scalability, and efficiency while maintaining strict controls and mitigating risk, all while remaining within budget and on schedule. VMware Infrastructure provides a strategic platform for the virtual datacenter that enables business agility by creating greater levels of flexibility in the infrastructure and operations. Further, a new set of automation products from VMware will give customers the extra edge they need to take advantage of their virtualized datacenter infrastructure to automate critical IT processes to drive increased business agility. Recent studies indicate that IT departments will invest significantly in automation in the datacenter over the next few years. Clearly, investments in virtual datacenter automation have the potential to transform IT operations and deliver significant benefits to the business. 1 Data Center Automation Defined, Evelyn Hubbert, Forrester, February 26, 2008, p. 7 3

4 VMware Infrastructure: A Strategic Platform for the Datacenter VMware virtualization is already having a significant impact, changing the way companies approach datacenter infrastructure and operations in 2008 and beyond. It changes how companies buy, plan, deploy, manage and even allocate costs for IT infrastructure. Infrastructure is on an inevitable shift from components that are physically integrated by vendors (for example, monolithic servers) or manually integrated by users to logically composed "fabrics" of computing, I/O and storage components (see below). As virtualization matures, the "next big thing" will be automating the composition and management of these virtualized resources. Enterprise Servers VirtualCenter Management Software Resource Pool Virtual Machines ESX Server ESX Server ESX Server Resource Pool Resource Pool Enterprise Storage Figure 1: VMware Infrastructure aggregates physical components in to computing fabrics of processors, memory, storage and networking The leading edge of this change is server virtualization. Today, roughly 40 percent of the server market is composed of x86 servers. Based on a traditional model of one application per server, roughly percent of the x86 computing capacity is unused at any one time. This unused capacity needs to be managed. It takes up datacenter space and requires power and cooling. VMware virtualization can unlock this underutilized capacity. IT organizations are approaching server virtualization as a costsaving measure, and it is reducing costs. However, organizations that have a mature server virtualization deployment in place are able to leverage virtualization for much more: faster deployments, reduced downtime, disaster recovery, variable usage accounting and usage chargeback, holistic capacity planning, and other benefits. How VMware Changes Systems Management and Enables Automation To understand how VMware Infrastructure enables automation, we need to look at some of the basic properties that server virtualization brings to the table. The key innovation that virtualization introduces is the new unit of management: the virtual machine. A virtual machine is a standardized software container. There are two keywords here 1) standardized, and 2) software. The first fundamental change that virtualization introduces is turning physical capabilities into software files. Virtual machines have few dependencies on physical infrastructure, and as a result, are easier to move and change, eliminating IT management headaches like configuring specific server hardware and device drivers, and troubleshooting incompatibilities between one system and the next. In addition, software files are significantly more malleable and easier to manipulate, lending themselves to automation in ways that physical assets can t. One way to understand the impact of turning hardware capabilities into software is to consider the evolution of money. It used to be very physical stashed or carried around in coins and then as paper. Once money was digitized, cumbersome physical paper and coins were turned into bytes, dramatically increasing the velocity of commerce. Money can now be moved around the world now with lightening speed because it has been virtualized and transformed in to information. By turning physical capabilities into software files, into bits and bytes, virtualization has the potential for same dramatic impact on IT it can speed and optimize IT management processes, and allow rapid and efficient movement of IT workloads around the world. 4

5 The second keyword is standardized. Virtual machines are hardware-independent containers and they encapsulate the complexity of the underlying hardware, and everything that is inside them the operating system, and the application. This standardization creates an opportunity to apply consistent operations on the virtual machine it doesn t matter on what hardware it is running, and what applications are running inside it; the virtual machine can be moved seamlessly across systems. Much like the euro introduced a standard currency that could move across over a dozen borders within Europe seamlessly, VMware allows customers to move virtualized servers effortlessly around the datacenter. Because virtual machines are standardized software containers files that aren t tied down by dependencies on the physical infrastructure IT management processes in the virtualized datacenter become simplified, akin to document management. The challenge of document management is fairly well understood it is about who creates, modifies and approves a document, where it is stored, and what retention policies apply to it. There is a lot of value in the ability to move and manipulate virtual machines, but in order to apply some of the benefits at the application level, the ability to manage an entire collection of virtual machines that jointly support an entire application stack becomes imperative. VMware provides this capability, which allows IT organizations to easily define policies and properties for the entire application stack or IT service. The Key Requirements for Virtualization in the Automated Datacenter Although virtualization serves as a starting point for automation, it relies on several capabilities in the virtualization platform itself. To automate IT processes effectively, virtual machines must be able to be moved on demand without disrupting users. Further, the platform must be scalable, efficient and provide high availability to protect critical applications. Dynamic resource pools also play a critical role in automation. It is not enough to manage virtual machines on physical hosts. The system needs to be able to recognize and manage groups of resources, not just specific hosts and configurations. This allows IT organizations to treat a group of servers, storage and networking resources as a single group, and set up rules to dynamically reconfigure IT services on the fly. Virtual machines can be moved to where the resources are. Only VMware Infrastructure provides these powerful building blocks that enable simplified management and automation in the datacenter. Customers are already benefiting from these capabilities: more than 100,000 customers use VMware today; of those, 85 percent are running VMware in production environments, and 46 percent have a VMware First policy (meaning they have made a decision to deploy either all or most new workloads on a VMware infrastructure). According to a recent IDC survey of virtualization users (primarily VMware customers), more than 80% of indicated that virtual infrastructure improves how IT departments manage and deliver services 2. Automating Critical IT Processes in the Virtual Datacenter In the context of the virtual datacenter, and building on the capabilities of VMware Infrastructure, VMware offers customers the tools to automate two key processes today IT service delivery and business continuity both of which are critical to the overall agility and availability of the systems that support the business. What is IT Service Delivery? An IT service can be anything from a compute resource to a complex combination of multiple virtual machines that support an entire application stack. IT service delivery is the process of developing, testing, staging, deploying, monitoring, changing and eventually retiring an IT service all in compliance with the established policies in the company. Though companies may vary in their definition and naming of the different stages of IT service delivery, this basic life cycle is substantially the same in every company. It is by far one of the most ubiquitous and important activities for any IT department, and spans the various zones and user constituencies of the overall datacenter: Production infrastructure, with a set of servers dedicated to production workloads. Lab infrastructure, dedicated to supporting new software development and quality assurance testing or temporary training environments. Pre-production infrastructure, with servers dedicated to supporting staging or release management of application workloads from initial integration through testing and staging in to production. 2 IDC Multiclient Study, Virtual Management

6 Automating Key Processes in the Virtual Datacenter Dev and QA Staging Production Dev QA Staging Change & Config Management Service Level Management Accelerate Delivery Streamline development and QA process Increase Manageability Streamline staging Expedite testing / troubleshooting Fast provisioning Maximize Service Levels Simple, cost-effective HA and DR Dynamic resource allocation VMware Infrastructure Enterprise-class Platform Resource Pool Resource Pool Resource Pool Resource Pool Figure 2: VMware makes it possible to automate key processes, including IT service delivery made up of development and QA, staging, and ongoing change management and business continuity in the virtual datacenter. IT services move across these zones as service changes, patches and updates are applied to systems. Managing growth, maintaining high availability, controlling server sprawl, increasing efficiency and responding to business requirements quickly represent key challenges across all of these areas. However, each functional area in the datacenter has specific requirements and challenges that require different approaches, which we will highlight briefly in the following section (for more detail on any of these solutions, please refer to com/ products/management_automation.html). Tracking and Controlling Virtual Machines throughout Their Lifecycle VMware virtualization allows companies to accelerate server provisioning in the datacenter significantly. Once companies discover the ease of deployment with VMware Infrastructure, they often ramp up their use of virtualization significantly which, if left unmanaged, can lead to some unintended consequences. For example, once a critical mass of virtual machines is attained, some new questions start surfacing: Are virtual machines approved properly for deployment? Do the virtual machines comply with configuration standards and other company policies? Who owns which virtual machine? Can this virtual machine be deleted? Most virtual machine provisioning requests are handled through spreadsheets, s, phone calls, or at best, a service ticketing system. Even in this last case, IT administrators don t have a consistent way to ensure that virtual machines are deployed in compliance with policy, and as a result, spend a great deal of time on manual provisioning processes. Managing virtual machine provisioning in an enterprise environment effectively requires IT to establish standardized templates, track requests and approvals, automate provisioning of approved request and control the lifecycle of the virtual machine to improve both resource utilization and corporate compliance. IT also needs a system of record that records all requests, deployments, changes and decommissioning of virtual machines. VMware Lifecycle Manager automates virtual machine request, provisioning, updates and changes and decommissioning of the virtual machine in compliance with corporate policies across the virtual datacenter. The IT administrator can create a catalog of virtual machines, each with associated deployment policies and a consistent request, approval and tracking process. This eliminates manual and repetitive tasks, reducing the risk of configuration errors and compliance issues, which in turn accelerates the IT organization s ability to respond to business requirements. Bringing Automation to the Lab Server sprawl, a familiar problem with production systems in the datacenter, is often more pronounced in development and test organizations or other lab environments, including support or training groups. Supporting and maintaining lab infrastructure and responding to the constant stream of requests to set up, configure or tear down system configurations in the lab is a huge burden for IT administrators. It s not unusual for the application development and QA organization to use several times more servers than the production environment. According to Forrester Research, one enterprise looking to build a business case for virtualization as a means of server consolidation found that it had three times as many servers in development and test as in production a clear 6

7 indicator that there was a role for virtualization to play in the pre-production area. 3 Keeping the systems in consistent known state is a significant challenge for lab admins as well if multiple users have access to the same systems, it s practically guaranteed that the systems will become dirty. For example, settings will be inadvertently changed, which may cause unforeseen problems and errors that are difficult to diagnose. However, it s difficult to apply the same rigorous change control policies to a lab environment that are normally applied to a production IT environment. The lab users require far more flexibility and must be able to change systems on the fly without waiting for change requests to be fulfilled. In many cases, lab environments are run outside of the datacenter because of the lack of perceived flexibility. At the same time, the labs don t benefit from datacenter resources like consolidated server infrastructure. If the lab infrastructure could be designed to give flexibility to the users while the IT department maintains overall control of resources like physical servers, storage and networking, many of the problems that bog down today s lab users could be alleviated. With rapid provisioning, self-service and the ability to change systems on the fly, development and QA users can become much more productive. VMware Infrastructure plays a pivotal role in driving increased efficiency in lab environments. The flexibility and hardware independence that VMware delivers with its platform allows lab users to more easily maintain consistent, clean system configurations. VMware Lab Manager builds on this provides the perfect solution for administrators who need to provide on-demand lab infrastructure to the users they support. It makes lab users self-sufficient by giving them a library of virtual machines that can be put to use at a moment s notice, and lets users manage and share projects with interconnected, multivirtual machine configurations. VMware Lab Manager automates key processes for the lab environment and allows the lab team to become much more efficient, while reducing capital and operational costs for the lab infrastructure. Release Management at the Speed of Software To roll out an IT service or business application into production, companies either develop the application in-house or customize packed application software. In either case, applications go through a rigorous release management or service transition process before they can be put in to production. The same process is also applied to production systems that need to be patched or updated. Increasingly, companies need to respond quickly to business requests for software, and roll out new services, patches or updates to either meet these requirements or simply remain in compliance with regulatory requirements. However, the release management process is often complex, costly and slow. IT services must be transitioned through a number of stages before being put in to production. Depending on the organization, the type or complexity of the IT service, the actual number or names of the stages may differ, but at minimum, the service transition process typically includes stages for: integrating the update or new application in to the overall environment; testing the assembled IT service; staging it to do performance testing and tuning and user acceptance testing. Homegrown or packaged application software Release Management Stages Integration Testing Staging UAT Production Assemble application components in the target environment Verify successful integration of components Performance tuning and testing User acceptance testing Risk of production downtime is reduced by splitting pre-production processes into discrete stages. Figure 3: Most IT organizations use a highly structured release management or service transition process to roll out new IT services or apply updates and patches to existing ones. Most companies create shadow instances of the application in each stage especially the earlier stages to allow for different projects to run concurrently. For example, one team may work on integration with Active Directory, while another team may work on database integration. This process can cause server sprawl and configuration drift between different instances of the same IT service. This creates the potential for significant problems down the road as production systems may not match the test systems. It can take weeks or months to move applications through the process from initial integration and testing in to production. However, IT is under pressure to get a new application into production as quickly as possible. Companies have been dealing with the problem in one of two ways either by limiting process controls at the expense of increasing the risk of configuration or compliance problems, or by creating stringent processes and controls that maintain consistency but inhibit change. Customers can leverage VMware Infrastructure to automate release management in the datacenter and reduce the issues of configuration drift and cumbersome release management. Because VMware Infrastructure allows IT to create standardized software containers, components can be standardized across 3 Forrester Research, Tradeoffs And Tactics For Test Environments, August

8 the different stages of release management, eliminating configuration drift. By treating groups of virtual machines as a single IT service, the IT operations team can more easily manage a business application throughout the release cycle. VMware Stage Manager supports the release management process (sometimes called change, configuration and release management or service transition), managing the movement of an IT service as it is deployed into production. By tracking these centrally, companies can also ensure consistency and compliance, and mitigate risks stemming from unplanned changes. Together with VMware Infrastructure, Stage Manager automates release management. It allows IT operations and application owners to roll out applications into production and complete change requests to production systems more quickly in response to business requirements. Stage Manager provides a global view of all applications and IT services under management and simplifies service operations through an intuitive user interface. Automating Business Continuity VMware Infrastructure also provides the building blocks to make business continuity and disaster recovery far more efficient and cost-effective. Because virtual machines can be standardized and easily moved across systems, business-critical workloads can be recovered on remote systems rapidly and reliably. The Challenges of Traditional Business Continuity Traditional disaster recovery plans depend on a very complex set of processes and infrastructure: duplicate datacenters, duplicate server infrastructure, processes for getting data to a recovery site, processes for restarting servers, processes for reinstalling operating systems, and other factors. Because of the complexity of disaster recovery plans and infrastructure, organizations are heavily dependent on significant amounts of personnel training, on the accuracy and completeness of thick paper runbooks that document the recovery process, and on perfect execution of the recovery process when an outage does occur. Because testing is disruptive and expensive, organizations have a limited ability to ensure that all of their training, documentation, and execution are well rehearsed and are therefore unable to predict the successful recovery of their IT services. As a result of these challenges, tests of recovery plans often fail; basic recovery of critical workloads (if successful at all) often takes days or weeks; and a significant amount of IT time and resources are consumed by managing and maintaining recovery plans. In short, most firms fail to meet the continuity requirements set by their organizations. How VMware Changes Everything for Business Continuity Virtual machines can easily be replicated and recovered. The core technologies in VMware Infrastructure allow virtual machines to be easily copied, archived, moved and restarted on any server. This mobility and hardware independence opens up new possibilities for business continuity. IT services can easily be moved to a remote site and restarted. Organizations can also leverage the resources at a recovery site to run non-critical applications, and quickly reallocate those resources to critical applications during a recovery event. Business Continuity with VMware: Rapid, Reliable, Manageable VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages the disaster recovery features and capabilities of the VMware Infrastructure platform with Site Recovery Manager, a new product developed specifically for disaster recovery. This new product will simplify and automate the key elements of disaster recovery: setting up disaster recovery plans, testing those plans, executing failover when a datacenter disaster occurs, and failing back to the primary datacenter. VMware Site Recovery Manager will make it possible for customers to provide faster, more reliable, and more affordable disaster recovery protection than previously possible. Although not a part of VMware Infrastructure, Site Recovery Manager works closely with VMware Infrastructure to manage and automate disaster recovery for virtual environments. 8

9 Conclusion: The New Automated Virtual Datacenter VMware virtualization is changing IT organizations dramatically, bringing unprecedented levels of flexibility to datacenter by eliminating complex hardware and software interdependencies and creating a standard platform for deploying mission-critical applications. This shift will require IT organizations to think differently about managing the IT infrastructure. VMware Infrastructure accelerates the rate of change, and has the potential to turn the datacenter on its head by services and IT resources are fluid rather than static, meaning that the traditional ways of managing systems no longer applies. The traditional way of managing systems no longer applies. Datacenter administrators need to account for this new dynamic IT environment as they deploy and manage virtualization on an increasingly greater scale. Ultimately, the automated virtual datacenter provides several key benefits: Eliminates manual, error-prone repetitive tasks, increasing ROI and freeing up IT to focus on strategic projects. Minimizes risk and improves compliance with IT and business policies Reduces configuration issues by maintaining consistent systems across the datacenter Allows IT to increase responsiveness to the business, accelerating time-to-market for IT services dramatically To do this effectively, IT organizations need best-of-breed tools designed to automate the new virtual datacenter. VMware Infrastructure provides the core building blocks for the new virtual datacenter, and solutions for automating IT service delivery and business continuity let customers leverage their existing investments in VMware to accelerate the rate of change while maintaining predictability and control, providing greater responsiveness to the business. Using VMware Infrastructure as a strategic platform for the datacenter, organizations can automate the virtual datacenter and realize the long soughtafter vision of business agility. 9

10 VMware, Inc Hillview Ave Palo Alto CA USA Tel Fax Copyright 2008 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Protected by one or more of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,961,806, 6,961,941, 6,880,022, 6,397,242, 6,496,847, 6,704,925, 6,496,847, 6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156, 6,795,966, 6,944,699, 7,069,413, 7,082,598, 7,089,377, 7,111,086, 7,111,145, 7,117,481, 7,149,843, 7,155,558, 7,222,221, 7,260,815, 7,260,820, 7,268,683, 7,275,136, 7,277,998, 7,277,999, 7,278,030, 7,281,102, 7,290,253; patents pending. VMware, the VMware boxes logo and design, Virtual SMP and VMotion are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.