Are You Missing Out on This Hidden Benefit of Virtualization?
Posted by Matt Girard on Thu, May 12, 2011 @ 05:00 AM
We’ve already discussed which benefits of virtualization apply to small and mid-market companies.
To recap, you can expect virtualization to reduce your hardware and power costs. That’s a no-brainer. When you host multiple virtual servers on a smaller number of physical servers, you’ll buy less hardware and spend less on power and cooling.
Virtualization also helps companies of all sizes provision servers more quickly, improve the productivity of their IT staffs, and free up IT resources to focus on strategic projects, rather than getting bogged down in maintenance.
But here’s one benefit you probably haven’t thought about: high availability.
How Virtualization Enables High Availability
Virtualization can do more than simply reduce 10 physical servers to three. It can also provide you with the automatic failover that leads to higher availability for all your servers.
It’s a pretty intuitive concept. If you’re running physical servers exclusively, and the physical server that’s running Microsoft Exchange goes down, then the application won’t come back online until the physical server does – or until you migrate Exchange to another physical server. Either way, your business users may be out of commission for as long as a few hours.
On the other hand, if you’re running Exchange on a virtual server, you can very quickly bring that virtual server back up on a different physical machine. The delay will be minimal for your business users, and the process will be seamless.
The Tools of the Trade
As you might have guessed, setting up this automatic failover revolves around having the right virtualization software in place. Take VMware vMotion™, for example.
vMotion technology enables you to move running virtual machines from one physical server to another with no impact to end users. Using vMotion ensures that you’ll always have an emergency plan for when physical servers crash. When you install vMotion, you set up an action plan that dictates how you want your applications to be migrated in the event of a physical server failure.
From there, vMotion works in the background to take the pulse of each of your servers. If a “heartbeat” stops because the network went down or a server stopped responding, vMotion will execute your action plan, moving your affected virtual servers to other physical servers with an eye on load balancing.
In other words, vMotion can reboot dead virtual servers onto new physical servers. There is typically only a slight “hiccup” in your business continuity.
Along with vMotion, it’s helpful to use IBM Systems Director software, as well as the Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) technology that’s built into a wide range of IBM hardware. PFA enhances failover by serving as your crystal ball into the future performance of your servers.
As your physical servers run, PFA determines whether they’re starting to have issues with memory, CPU, fans, and the like. When trouble begins to brew, PFA sends an alert to IBM Systems Director to warn about a potential server failure. Systems Director then executes your predetermined action plan to take the affected server offline.
But before doing so, Systems Director communicates with VMware vMotion, which can initiate a graceful migration of virtual servers from one physical server to another. The result? No downtime for your business users.
The People Side
There’s one more piece to the high availability puzzle. When server failure looms, Systems Director can send an alert to the technical consulting firm that implemented your virtualization technology. It can also inform IBM that the server will need to be repaired or replaced. From there, your technology partners will spring into action to restore your systems to proper function.
Want to learn more about virtualization? Check out the following free white papers: