Masters of Disaster
Flexibility also pays with regard to disaster recovery, an area where CIOs are increasingly looking to virtualization. Nate Stuyvesant, CTO of Genilogix, an IT consultancy, says disaster recovery is his company’s biggest IT management issue, period. He’s not alone.

According to Gartner data, 70 percent to 75 percent of Gartner’s clients who are using virtualization for x86 servers are also using it for disaster recovery. Genilogix runs 60 VMs on four servers across development, testing and production environments. Stuyvesant relies on VMotion to move a server over to another physical box and effectively eliminate downtime, VMware’s DRS tool alone is a cogent reason to consider virtualization in the first place, he says.

Eric Miller, president and CEO of Genesis Multimedia, a Web hosting company that also designs its customers’ Web applications, uses VMotion to increase uptime and improve reliability in his environment of 55 virtual machines running on three hosts, where some customers need higher utilization than others. Miller relies on VMotion, driven by DRS, to move the virtual machines around.

Genesis is no stranger to virtualization—it has been operating in a virtual server environment since VMware made its debut—but management isn’t always easy. The initial move to consolidate 12 servers used for Web hosting, and two larger servers for database systems, helped Genesis manage its physical servers, but moving virtual machines around, implementing patches and performing BIOS upgrades without experiencing downtime was difficult, Miller says. As an infrastructure provider, Genesis must provide high service levels, so uptime is critical. “We couldn’t maintain those without VMotion and DRS,” says Miller.

Add-on tools can help address the problem of “VM sprawl,” by keeping track of how many VMs you have and where.

“It’s somewhat ironic that the benefit of virtualization is resource optimization, but it encourages messy behavior,” says Cameron Haight, a research vice president at Gartner, noting that almost all his clients cite VM sprawl as a big worry. “You can spend these things so quickly that you lose track of what you have,” Haight says.

SDDPC’s Knode says Vizioncore helps him prevent VM sprawl in the first place. “By watching the metrics of the virtual environment, we plan ahead. So by using VMware and Vizioncore I can see how many additional resources are available on an ESX host, and when is a good point to move machines or purchase additional servers or storage. We’re using the product as a preventative measure.”

Virtualization 3.0
Monster’s King and Wachovia’s Bishop both say they’d like virtualization management vendors to take the next step—better integration of their tools with existing management software. For example, King would like to see the tools in HP’s Mercury Business Availability Center suite (which Monster uses for transaction and infrastructure monitoring) integrated with BalancePoint.