It’s been said too many times...’we can save money with virtualisation this year’ It’s true you can, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it’s the answer to ALL our prayers.
The cost saving buzz word for 2008 is ‘Cloud Computing’ clearly a very different concept and not (in all cases) comparable to servers running your organisations business apps, messaging and collaboration policies blah blah blah.
Don’t forget about...
Before I get onto the voodoo of licensing (more on that further down) in a virtual world don’t forget about the management overhead of the...
- Physical hardware, Networking, Storage and backups
- Host server operating system (ESX/VMware and or MS Virtual Server or Hyper-V)
- Guest server operating systems
- Guest server products e.g. Exchange
- Monitoring systems
- Incident, problem, change and capacity management (to name 4 of the ITIL framework components)
If reducing rack space, power and cooling are the key goals of virtualisation, you’ve made the decision of virtualising your organisations systems for the right reasons.
Consultancy and Migrations...
If you think the migration of physical to virtual is easy then you could be right but to do it internally may result in losing a significant amount of the money you were to hoping to save with virtualisation in the first place. At a high level you’ll need to budget for training, proof of concepts, project management and risk mitigation! This is by no means a plug to use virtualisation consultancies but the decision of migrations (obviously) isn’t a light one, even for organisations with 100 mailboxes or a collection of documents that equate to less than 1TB. Like most things, outsourcing can give you an external SLA (service level agreement), contractual obligations, the use of certified system engineers and a formal hand over to your operations team.
Here are just a few questions that you should be asking your organisation, IT project team and yourself:
- What's the business purpose?
- What are the timelines for 'go live'
- Who will benefit the most from a new VM platform?
- Is the VM platform aimed at reducing existing physical infrastructure or a means to deploy additional servers?
- What Virtualisation options have you considered?
- Do you expect to use existing VMware and or Virtual Server/PC images?
- Number of expected VM guests?
- What are the guest OS requirements? (Linux, Windows 200x/XP/Vista)
- Are there any audit and compliance requirements?
Virtual Licensing Voodoo
I’m going to concentrate on the Microsoft model for the moment – PLEASE NOTE: this is simply an example that consists of a SQL Server and BizTalk configuration. Operating system licensing in a virtual world is slightly different.
A few examples of Microsoft products that fall into the ‘Per Processor Licensing’ category are Microsoft BizTalk® Server, SQL Server and ISA Server, etc.
If any of the above server products are run in a virtual OS environment the licensing model is based on the number of virtual processors used by that virtual OS environment, rather than all the physical processors in the server.
Regarding the guest operating system, by selecting Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition as the OS of each VM guest you’re permitted to run, at any one time, up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server. I haven’t confirmed Server 2008’s model yet, so this is subject to change.
Licensing Wrap up
This is a pretty in depth subject and a tricky one (voodoo). Always ensure you get up-to-date advice from your software provider to avoid breaking any licensing laws!!
If you want to learn more or speak to us about Virtualisation email me at matt.mould@conchango.com