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By Andrew Donoghue, 20 November 2009 16:17

COMMENT

Adoption rates of virtualisation have yet to match the hype surrounding it, here Andrew Donoghue hears from businesses who've already taken the plunge.

Despite vendors touting the numerous benefits that virtualisation can bestow on businesses that adopt the technology, there is a flaw in the rhetoric that is hard to get around: not many companies are actually adopting virtualisation.

Figures from analyst Gartner released earlier this year reveal only 16 per cent of current IT workloads are running on virtual machines. Although that estimate is set to grow to some 50 per cent of workloads by 2012, it still paints a picture of the reality of virtualisation being well behind the 'must-have' technology image portrayed by vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and VMware.

Zahl Limbuwala, chair of the British Computer Society datacentre specialist group says some of the coolness towards virtualisation is down to the economic downturn making any new IT projects harder to execute. But also, virtualisation technology itself has matured and companies are taking a more strategic approach to it.

"It is generally accepted that there is a positive benefit from virtualisation irrespective of which technology you decide to virtualise with," he says. "But I think there has been a dampening of enthusiasm around virtualisation and consolidation projects over the last 18 months probably due to a combination of the economic climate and increasing complexity around the technology."

According to Limbuwala, companies are increasingly realising that successful virtualisation is about more than just tackling a few servers and hoping to save hardware and electricity costs.

"I think there is a little more complexity and detail to it now than people just saying, 'Let's just go and call in our favourite virtualisation vendor, buy a set of new blades, install them and we'll make a 16 to 1 saving on energy costs'," he says. "I think there is a little bit more thought going into it now and so it takes a little bit more time."

John Tuccillo, chairman of the board for The Green Grid, a confederation of end-user and vendor organisations focusing on energy efficiency, believes companies have begun to realise that virtualisation isn't the panacea it was made out to be and are taking a more considered approach.

"I think a lot of people looked on virtualisation as a silver bullet," he says. "Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic tool but it's just one of the tools available. And it's not an inexpensive exercise to get value from virtualisation."

Despite the slower than anticipated uptake, what advice do companies already using the technology have to offer?

Trinity Mirror, publisher of The Daily Mirror and The Daily Record, has been using virtualisation for nearly two years as part of a process to consolidate computing infrastructure from multiple server rooms across its nationwide network of offices into two central datacentres in London and the Midlands.

The company has implemented a virtual server infrastructure within a VMware environment, and uses storage technology from NetApp to help manage the data. The group also uses virtual cloning technology, and has seen a 70 to 75 per cent disk-space saving as a result. The organisation has around 250 virtual servers running VMware but still has a larger number of physical devices which have yet to be virtualised.

Peter Raettig, IT operations manager at Trinity Mirror, says the most important issue to consider when approaching virtualisation is to realise that not every system can be virtualised. "The main thing we learned is that you have to pick and choose what is suitable for virtualisation," he says. "Don't assume that you are going to virtualise everything."

For example, Raettig said the company has no plans to virtualise its Oracle database as the risks are just too great if something were to go wrong. "We would never use VMware for our Oracle - that is a given - we were never going to do the databases," he says. "You have to use common sense really. Two years ago it was all about support and Oracle was not supported by VMware."

The dangerous position to avoid, says Raettig, is for something to go wrong on a virtual server - especially with a vital application such as database - and the application vendor blaming the virtualisation provider and vice-versa. "We wouldn't want to end up in the finger-pointing exercise where Oracle are in a position to say, 'Nope, we are OK. It's your VMware that is the problem'," he says. "There are something that you just want to keep as simple as possible."

Another company that has switched to virtualised infrastructure - and amid the financial downturn no less - is Royal London Asset Management (RLAM). The financial services company provides investment management services to a range of public and private sector companies including the UK's largest mutual life and pensions company, Royal London Group.

Like Trinity Mirror, London-based RLAM embarked on virtualisation when VMware was not only the market leader but the only really option in town - before the likes of Microsoft and Red Hat had entered the market and increased the choice of providers. The company began exploring virtualising its server systems in early 2008, with the project being signed off by upper management last August and first kit installed in November of 2008.

The push to virtualise was driven by a rapid expansion over the last few years which had left the company short of space for its servers, according to Dennis Leeks, IT director at RLAM. "We had the aim of virtualising everything that we could. We had 33 physical servers at the time and we were rapidly running out of rack-space in our environment," he says.

The company has now managed to virtualise around 24 of its physical servers and claims the process has been largely pain-free. But, according to Leaks, the key is to work with another company which has experience in virtualisation as well as to make sure that the IT department receives training in the technology well before it's installed.

Back-up and disaster recovery is also another vital issue to consider with virtualisation according to Paul Carpenter, senior infrastructure support technician for RLAM.

Consolidating physical machines onto one device running multiple virtual machines might make sense from a financial and energy efficient standpoint - but it also introduces issues around back-up and disaster recovery.

RLAM is using technology from VMware partner Veeam to bolster its back-up capability. "The one lesson we learned is to look at your business continuity and back-up very closely so that you are buying the solution that works best for you," Carpenter says." And never underestimate how many storage area networks you need."

Uptake of virtualisation might not be progressing at the speed that vendors would like but there is real-life evidence that, provided it is approached in a strategic and thoughtful way, virtualisation can live up to at least some of its promise.