Can You Really Support Business Continuity Requirements?

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1 Can You Really Support Business Continuity Requirements? Intelligent N+X Redundancy, Placement Affinities, & Future Proofing in the Virtualized Data Center

2 BACKGROUND One of the significant gains provided by virtualization is the ability to simplify business continuity management in IT. Workload portability and data replication capabilities mean that physical infrastructure failures no longer need impact application services, and they can rapidly be recovered even in the event of complete site failure. Indeed, virtualization provides greater scope to support business continuity requirements; however, Enterprises and Service Providers face new challenges ensuring they have enough compute capacity in their virtualized data centers to support their business continuity requirements, whilst at the same time not over provisioning infrastructure capacity resulting in unnecessary capital expenditure. This problem s complexity arises from the shared nature of virtualized compute resources, the changing resource consumption patterns of applications they support, and the rapid growth in virtualized application workloads experienced by most organizations today. As you continue to support more application workloads in your virtualized datacenter, can you say with certainty that you can continue to meet your company s business continuity requirements? If not, how do you benchmark your current situation to determine what action you should take to get compliant and mitigate the risk of your organization s exposure to failures in your IT infrastructure? 2

3 CAN YOUR VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTER RESOURCES REALLY SUPPORT YOUR ORGANIZATION S BUSINESS CONTINUITY REQUIREMENTS? PLANNING & MANAGING CAPACITY TO SUPPORT DIFFERING BUSINESS CONTINUITY NEEDS IN YOUR VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTER Given that different applications have different levels of business importance, there are often a number of business continuity requirements where capacity management requirements need to be catered for in different ways. Key examples include: N + X redundancy within compute clusters This is the most basic requirement, providing protection for virtualized application workloads in the event of hardware failure in compute clusters. Whilst redundant compute capacity might be designed into the initial architecture of a cluster, at any given point in time, many organizations have no way to track when they are at risk of running out of compute capacity to maintain support for N+X redundancy. This is a constantly moving target given organic growth in application workload resource consumption and the constant provisioning of new application workloads onto the virtualized IT infrastructure. Load Balanced Application Workloads Load balanced applications are common in today s data centers. Load balancing not only enables scalability, but also provides protection against the failure of underlying compute resources and application instances. When running these types of applications in an infrastructure, organizations often use workload placement anti-affinity rules, configured in the hypervisor management system, to prevent load balanced instances ending up on the same physical hardware. This prevents the complete loss of service in the event of underlying hardware failure. On one hand this simplifies the job of making the application architecture more resilient, but it also introduces new capacity management challenges, because anti-affinity rules constrain the use of available compute resources, based on the rules of where specific workloads can reside, making capacity requirements much harder to calculate. Full Site Recovery Many organizations will implement a business continuity strategy where they can recover certain applications, in remote locations, in the event of a Data Center failure. These scenarios may be supported on hardware that is normally used for test and development purposes. A 3 rd party service provider may also be utilized. In both scenarios it is important to be able to determine on an ongoing basis, taking into account daily changes in the IT environment that such failure scenarios can be accommodated. 3

4 MANAGING THE DESIRED STATE Virtualization has enabled IT infrastructure to become a utility platform, through the ability to share infrastructure resources amongst multiple application workloads and provision them and decommission them through software. Ensuring there is enough infrastructure capacity available to meet the resource demands of application workloads is critical in maintaining consistent performance. At the same time, it is important to ensure that the infrastructure is not over provisioned because this impacts the overall economics associated with service delivery, driving up the cost to host each application workload. At VMTurbo, we refer to this state as the Desired State, where you eliminate inefficiencies in your infrastructure without compromising application performance. Managing the environment in the Desired State is complex because of the dynamic nature of application workload resource consumption, technical and business constraints that govern how the infrastructure can be utilized, and the rate of change driven by organic growth and new IT projects. Business Continuity requirements are also a critical element that must be considered, as they are a critical part of the ability to maintain IT in the Desired State, in the event that specific components in the IT architecture or an entire data center fail. Imagine the impact of being unable to maintain reliable service for your most critical applications, in the event of a component or complete site failure. Having the available compute capacity to facilitate this is critical. Today, native hypervisor scheduling and monitoring tools do not provide the Decision Analytics to ensure that virtualized IT is maintained in the Desired State on an ongoing basis, taking into account business continuity requirements. This introduces risk to an organization s business continuity plan, which must be mitigated with rigorous processes, human resources, and/or management systems that can automate the decision making to ensure that the Desired State is continuously maintained, while business continuity requirements are met. 4

5 CAN YOUR VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTER RESOURCES REALLY SUPPORT YOUR ORGANIZATION S BUSINESS CONTINUITY REQUIREMENTS? KEY STRATEGIES TO MANAGE VIRTUALIZED IT IN THE DESIRED STATE TO OPTIMIZE THE COST OF DELIVERING VIRTUALIZED COMPUTE Operations Management In order to maintain virtualized IT performance in the Desired State an organization s management tooling should provide the ability to set policies that determine operational constraints, within which they want their virtualized data center to operate. These should include multiple resource utilization constraints (e.g. memory, CPU, I/O, Network, etc.) and workload placement policies (affinity/anti-affinity rules) that maintain application resilience and/or performance. The system should continuously determine what specific resource allocation decisions should be taken in an ongoing basis, based on these policies, to maintain the Desired State. These decisions might include moving workloads to different compute and storage resources, provisioning more physical or virtual resource capacity or suspending resources. The Desired State should also take into account business continuity requirements. For example, in a 5 node compute cluster with N+1 redundancy, a 60% utilization goal for resources like memory and CPU will provide contingency to support the failure of a host, and still enable reliable service delivery, as the resulting utilization on the remaining 4 nodes would be within the range of 80%. In order to mitigate the risk of non compliance with Business Continuity requirements, it is imperative that IT operations has the capability to continually track the state of the environment and proactively prevent it from diverging from the Desired State. In hundreds of Business Impact Assessments undertaken by VMTurbo to benchmark customers environments, it was determined that a high percentage of customers did not proactively understand whether they were at risk of being unable to deliver business continuity, even in the event of simple hardware failures. Do you know whether your environment could sustain a simple hardware failure and continue to deliver reliable service? What would the business impact be if you could not reliably service the business in a situation like this? Planning For The Future As well as understanding whether your environment is able to meet business continuity requirements today, the other dimension that must be taken into account is the future. In virtualized IT environments, the only constant is change. Change drives the need to constantly review whether your organization can continue to comply with its business continuity requirements. 5

6 Without sophisticated tooling, such an ongoing assessment is particularly complex, time consuming, and error prone requiring the skills of highly experienced engineers. Alternatively, the ability to play what if and simulate potential failure scenarios using intelligent capacity-planning software simplifies the process of determining the outcome and the necessary resource allocation decisions required to maintain compliance with your organization s needs. This capability can go beyond modeling simple N+X hardware failures, all the way to simulating complete site failures. In this process, you can also determine the impact of recovering IT services in locations where capacity is constrained and the business needs to determine which applications should be recovered, in order of business priority, given a limited set of compute resources. If you are using a 3rd party service provider to support your business continuity requirements what if simulation can also be used to determine what infrastructure they will need to provision to meet your requirements. These what if simulations can be fully documented in reports that support the ongoing requirement to demonstrate that your business continuity plans comply with the needs of your internal stakeholders, external customers, and regulatory bodies. Using Test/Dev Infrastructure To Support Business Continuity Both VMware and Hyper V virtualization platforms provide the flexibility today to support the dynamic migration of workloads between clusters of compute resources, without interrupting application services. In addition to enabling organizations to drive greater data center efficiency by better exploiting pockets of under-utilized compute resources, this flexibility also enables IT to deliver more effective Business Continuity strategy. This is achieved, in the event of failures, by enabling the remaining resources to be consumed, in order of business priority, by those applications that are most important to the business. 6

7 CAN YOUR VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTER RESOURCES REALLY SUPPORT YOUR ORGANIZATION S BUSINESS CONTINUITY REQUIREMENTS? To exploit this capability, an organization s virtualization management platform should provide the ability to define groups for tiers of applications and set priorities that reflect their level of importance (e.g., Gold, Silver, Bronze). On an ongoing basis, the system should evaluate the compute capacity that is available to meet the demands of application tiers, and determine situations where less important applications should be suspended in order to maintain the service of those of greater importance. These capabilities provide organizations with the ability to dynamically exploit compute resources, which might otherwise have been reserved for test/dev workloads in the event of infrastructure failures. Has your organization thought about the possible benefits in terms of risk and cost reduction that could be unlocked by exploiting these capabilities? ASSESSING YOUR BUSINESS CONTINUITY EFFECTIVENESS VMTurbo undertakes Business Impact Assessments as a free service, so organizations can clearly understand the how effective they would be in mitigating the risks to which they are exposed in the event of failures in key components of the virtualized IT architecture all the way to complete data center failures. VMTurbo s Business Impact Assessment involves the following steps, which are typically undertaken over a 2-4 week period: 7

8 1. Scoping determine the scope of the Business Impact Assessment (clusters, data centers, service platform, etc.) 2. Software deployment this takes approximately 10 minutes 3. Data collection VMTurbo s software automatically analyzes the target environment over 1-2 weeks 4. Data Analysis VMTurbo s engineers undertake a number of what if simulations to determine the specific risk to which IT operations might be exposed in the event of different failure scenarios 5. Executive Report VMTurbo prepares a report detailing the results including technical and financial analysis The entire process typically involves a total investment of 1-2 man-hours of effort, on behalf of the customers typically resulting in a low cost, high value investment. 8

9 ABOUT VMTURBO Founded in 2009, VMTurbo is a company founded on the belief that IT operations management needs to be fundamentally changed to allow your organization to unlock the full value of today s virtualized infrastructure and cloud services. Our charter is to transform IT operations in cloud and virtualized environments from a complex, labor intensive, and volatile process to one that is simple, automated and predictable delivering greater control in maintaining a healthy state and consistent service delivery. VMTurbo offers an innovative control system for virtualized data centers. By leveraging the dynamic resource allocation abilities of virtualization and automating decisions for resource allocation and workload placement in software, our solution ensures applications get the resources required while maximizing utilization of IT assets. Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide have selected VMTurbo, including British Telecom, Colgate, CSC and the London School of Economics. VMTurbo is headquartered in Massachusetts, with offices in New York, California, United Kingdom and Israel Boylston Street, Eighth Floor Boston, MA