29
Fri, Nov
0 New Articles

IT Virtualization Best Practices

Managed Services / SaaS / PaaS / IaaS
Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

What's the best way to plan for and estimate the ROI of a virtualization project? Find out in this article.

 

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from the book IT Virtualization Best Practices, published by MC Press.

 

Virtualizing IT resources can lead to savings of over 50 percent in hardware, maintenance, and energy costs in a data center. The transitional cost of virtualizing large-scale IT infrastructures is hard to estimate, however. If not planned correctly, it can often outweigh the benefits of virtualization for several years. This chapter outlines a "divide and conquer" approach to planning and cost estimation for virtualization transformations. This enables an organization to plan and execute complex virtualization transformations while maximizing its return on investment (ROI) within a favorable payback period.

 

Barriers to Cost-Effective Virtualization

This section offers a bit of background to support the detailed discussions of organizational environments that come later in this chapter. It also summarizes the approach to virtualization we'll lay out in a virtualization pattern.

 

IT infrastructures in large organizations are highly complex. They tend to have thousands of servers running hundreds of applications on a diverse set of hardware, operating systems, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components, and homegrown applications in a multi-vendor, multi-version environment. Similar applications might have been developed at different times for different parts of the organization, especially when the organization has been created through corporate mergers. Combining similar applications might prove difficult because they are running on different hardware and operating systems. The complexity is further increased by business rules and constraints that are imposed by an organization's environment.

 

Given that 80 percent of the world's data centers were built before 2001, many of their hardware, operating systems, applications, network, middleware, and data center facilities are outdated or near end of support from their original manufacturers and providers. Many of these components were also designed with earlier business requirements in mind and are not able to scale up or out readily to meet the future computing demands of the business.

 

Virtualization of the IT infrastructure provides an organization with the opportunity to upgrade and consolidate these components to better address and manage future strategic, tactical, and operational business goals, and IT requirements. The virtualization effort, however, also depends on the particular components and their uses by the organization in a deep and detailed way. For instance, management might forbid a major upgrade to some critical component, such as a payment system, because any disruption could be fatal to the corporation. However, the organization might desperately desire a major upgrade to some other component that has dependencies on the critical system.

 

Thus, revamping the IT infrastructure and data center facilities via a virtualization transformation can be a very complicated and expensive endeavor. Without careful design, planning, and execution, it can end in unaffordable costs or even disaster.

 

As a reader of this book, you are probably involved with preparing proposals and budgets for virtualization transformations. You might be used to doing migrations on a small, local basis through direct source-to-target mapping and ground-up cost estimation. These straightforward planning techniques break down during a large virtualization transformation because of large combinations of servers and applications that have interdependencies. In fact, if you stick to traditional techniques, you might not even have time to generate a proposal covering a project of such a large scope. Furthermore, sticking to these traditional estimation approaches deprives you of optimization opportunities in planning and execution by failing to fully realize the economies that present themselves in large-scale transformation programs.

 

Achieving an optimal transformation in such an environment requires the assessment of a large number of decision variables and transformation parameters and the evaluation of multiple possible paths. We recommend that IT virtualization transformation be managed in a phased approach, with the goal of minimizing risk while maximizing ROI. This requires a meticulous approach to planning and cost estimates, along with comprehensive program management to set up and achieve the results in the plan.

 

The pattern in this chapter segments the enormous task of virtualization among both resources and time:

 

  • By segmenting the task among your resources—servers, applications, and data stores—you can group your staff's efforts efficiently and apply a single project to multiple resources.
  • By segmenting the task in time—among multiple independent projects—you can budget for each project separately and execute the ones with the best chance of success and ROI first.

 

The scope of each project is determined by examining a number of business and technical variables and objectives. It is managed as an independent end-to-end program, governed by rigorous program management. Each project contributes to the efficiency and progress of the organization as the virtualization transformation continues.

Scenario

To give a sense of the forces affecting a large virtualization project, this section provides a typical client scenario.

 

The CIO of a financial firm that manages global financial assets is driven by business pressures from her stakeholders to optimize IT infrastructure and data center costs, while continuing to support the company's strategic business goals. These strategic goals are revenue growth, expanding margins, and competitive differentiation via better alignment of business and IT models. The firm has grown over the decades via an aggressive acquisition strategy. This has created several islands of technology in the form of data centers with a heterogeneous mix of hardware, software platforms, and applications.

 

The firm's IT infrastructure includes over 1,500 applications, hosted on 5,000 servers that are a heterogeneous mix of distributed servers and a handful of old mainframes. Some of the factors weighing down the data centers include the following:

 

  • In addition to the presence of operating systems and hardware from almost every major vendor in the industry, the company's IT portfolio also includes a diverse mix of applications, ranging from COTS applications to those with specific major customizations, as well as those developed in-house.
  • The demand at this firm's seven data centers reached maximum power capacity this year. Fifty percent of these data centers cannot be upgraded to increase power density.
  • The currently designed data center capacity is not suited for the varied requirements of production servers, versus those of development and test servers.
  • The data center landscape has a high degree of fragmentation, with four medium/large locations, three small locations, and many additional "data rooms." This fragmentation also contributes to higher data center personnel costs and facilities management costs.
  • The layout of the existing data centers also results in unnecessary operational risks (e.g., dependence on multiple lower-tier data centers), an inefficient disaster recovery model (e.g., requiring additional equipment to replicate data), and a very expensive storage environment (e.g., most of the data resides on expensive tier-1 storage without an effective information lifecycle and data management policy).
  • The production infrastructure for individual applications is spread across the multiple data center facilities. The impact of planned shutdowns and maintenance or unplanned outages is high because the staff members don't understand the interdependencies with other facilities well. The dependency of application chains on multiple data centers multiplies the risk of failure and complicates recovery.

 

Although the IT staff has some projects to address the complexity of maintaining and recovering applications across all data centers, the CIO has recognized that a critical enabler will be the larger job of creating a much simpler data center landscape. Hence, the firm's executive management has given the CIO the charter to consolidate the firm's fragmented islands of technology into three state-of-the-art data centers over a period of two years.

 

The CIO has decided to leverage virtualization technology to rationalize and optimize IT infrastructure. She has set out to develop a plan for an IT infrastructure transformation with the following strategic objectives (SOs), critical success factors (CSFs), and key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind.

 

Strategic Objective 1: Reduce Annual Server Operating Expenses

The objective to reduce annual server operating expenses by $8 million and capital expenditures by $40 million will be met using the following CSFs and KPIs:

 

CSF 1.1: Reduce the server count and associated maintenance/license costs for distributed servers.

  • KPI 1.1.1: Reduce the number of physical servers by more than 80 percent.
  • KPI 1.1.2: Reduce the number of operating system instances by more than 20 percent.

 

CSF 1.2: Reduce the IT labor costs needed to support the target state for distributed servers.

  • KPI 1.2.1: Reduce server administration staff by more than 20 percent.
  • KPI 1.2.2: Reduce the average server burden on administrators by more than 30 percent, through simplification and automation.

 

Strategic Objective 2: Align IT to Service Level Expectations

The objective to align IT to service level expectations will be met using the following CSF and KPIs:

 

CSF 2.1: Business platforms will have a business-driven Service-Level Agreement (SLA) and cost breakdown.

  • KPI 2.1.1: Service level managers will assign Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) to all servers and publish compliance reports.
  • KPI 2.1.2: Cost transparency will be accomplished by applying unit costs to all consumed server resources.

 

Strategic Objective 3: Simplify the IT Environment

The objective to simplify and standardize the IT environment will be met using the following CSF and KPIs:

 

CSF 3.1: Leverage repeatable processes, procedures, and technology standards.

  • KPI 3.1.1: Post all of the organization's standard technology and services in its IT service catalog.
  • KPI 3.1.2: Require explicit approval of all nonstandard technology from the Change Control Board.

 

Strategic Objective 4: Increase the Agility of IT

The objective to increase the agility of IT to respond to business needs will be met using the following CSF and KPI:

 

CSF 4.1: Automate and accelerate the operational readiness of new or modified servers.

  • KPI 4.1.1: Keep the average request-to-readiness time for new OS images to less than four days.

 

Strategic Objective 5: Optimize the Use of IT Resources

The objective to optimize the use of IT resources will be met using the following CSF and KPIs:

 

CSF 5.1: Increase the average utilization of servers.

  • KPI 5.1.1: Keep the average CPU utilization across the entire production server landscape at more than 60 percent.
  • KPI 5.1.2: Complete provisioning and application readiness of standard offerings in less than five days.

 

The CIO understands that the virtualization transformation of the server infrastructure will be critical to achieving the strategic objectives. However, she is quite concerned about the cost, complexity, risks, and scheduling of the transformation. Her team has never undertaken a complex IT infrastructure transformation of this nature.

 

 

Mickey Iqbal, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, leads the architecture and technology deployment strategy for IBM’s Strategic Outsourcing business and directs the global programs for hardware and software infrastructure resource optimization and technology deployment in IBM’s data centers. 

Dr. Mithkal Smadi, an IBM Distinguished Engineer in Integrated Service Delivery, played a leading role in the early development and deployment of IBM lean transformation methodology across IBM’s Integrated Technology Delivery and Integrated Managed Business Process Delivery divisions. 

Chris Molloy, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, is responsible for optimizing the 8 million square feet of data center space used around the world to support IBM’s outsourcing customers. 

Jim Rymarczyk is an IBM Fellow and the Chief Virtualization Technologist for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. He is a former computer science adjunct professor at Union College.


MC Press books written by Mickey Iqbal, Mithkal Smadi, Chris Molloy, and Jim Rymarczyk available now on the MC Press Bookstore.

IT Virtualization Best Practices IT Virtualization Best Practices
Discover the path toward a lean virtualization implementation, using an approach based on service patterns.
List Price $49.95

Now On Sale

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS

LATEST COMMENTS

Support MC Press Online

$

Book Reviews

Resource Center

  • SB Profound WC 5536 Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application. You can find Part 1 here. In Part 2 of our free Node.js Webinar Series, Brian May teaches you the different tooling options available for writing code, debugging, and using Git for version control. Brian will briefly discuss the different tools available, and demonstrate his preferred setup for Node development on IBM i or any platform. Attend this webinar to learn:

  • SB Profound WP 5539More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT Generic IBM announced the E1080 servers using the latest Power10 processor in September 2021. The most powerful processor from IBM to date, Power10 is designed to handle the demands of doing business in today’s high-tech atmosphere, including running cloud applications, supporting big data, and managing AI workloads. But what does Power10 mean for your data center? In this recorded webinar, IBMers Dan Sundt and Dylan Boday join IBM Power Champion Tom Huntington for a discussion on why Power10 technology is the right strategic investment if you run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. In this action-packed hour, Tom will share trends from the IBM i and AIX user communities while Dan and Dylan dive into the tech specs for key hardware, including:

  • Magic MarkTRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now!  Request Now.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericForms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericIT security is a top priority for businesses around the world, but most IBM i pros don’t know where to begin—and most cybersecurity experts don’t know IBM i. In this session, Robin Tatam explores the business impact of lax IBM i security, the top vulnerabilities putting IBM i at risk, and the steps you can take to protect your organization. If you’re looking to avoid unexpected downtime or corrupted data, you don’t want to miss this session.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericCan you trust all of your users all of the time? A typical end user receives 16 malicious emails each month, but only 17 percent of these phishing campaigns are reported to IT. Once an attack is underway, most organizations won’t discover the breach until six months later. A staggering amount of damage can occur in that time. Despite these risks, 93 percent of organizations are leaving their IBM i systems vulnerable to cybercrime. In this on-demand webinar, IBM i security experts Robin Tatam and Sandi Moore will reveal:

  • FORTRA Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAManaging messages on your IBM i can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response and resources must be monitored—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you won’t miss important system events? Automate your message center with the Robot Message Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAThe thought of printing, distributing, and storing iSeries reports manually may reduce you to tears. Paper and labor costs associated with report generation can spiral out of control. Mountains of paper threaten to swamp your files. Robot automates report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving, and offers secure, selective online report viewing. Manage your reports with the Robot Report Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAFor over 30 years, Robot has been a leader in systems management for IBM i. With batch job creation and scheduling at its core, the Robot Job Scheduling Solution reduces the opportunity for human error and helps you maintain service levels, automating even the biggest, most complex runbooks. Manage your job schedule with the Robot Job Scheduling Solution. Key features include:

  • LANSA Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.

  • LANSAWhen it comes to creating your business applications, there are hundreds of coding platforms and programming languages to choose from. These options range from very complex traditional programming languages to Low-Code platforms where sometimes no traditional coding experience is needed. Download our whitepaper, The Power of Writing Code in a Low-Code Solution, and:

  • LANSASupply Chain is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. From raw materials for manufacturing to food supply chains, the journey from source to production to delivery to consumers is marred with inefficiencies, manual processes, shortages, recalls, counterfeits, and scandals. In this webinar, we discuss how:

  • The MC Resource Centers bring you the widest selection of white papers, trial software, and on-demand webcasts for you to choose from. >> Review the list of White Papers, Trial Software or On-Demand Webcast at the MC Press Resource Center. >> Add the items to yru Cart and complet he checkout process and submit

  • Profound Logic Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application.

  • SB Profound WC 5536Join us for this hour-long webcast that will explore:

  • Fortra IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn: