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Controlling cost in the Virtual Sprawl!
There are now many organisations and businesses with mature virtual environments. As time passes they require expansion due to business demands the same as any physical environment.
In a physical environment IT Managers have been used to receiving requests for faster servers, more HDD/Data storage and more network performance from Department heads or Application Administrators. These requests are usually business driven, such as new applications, application upgrades or business expansion. The response to these requests (in a physical environment) is to provision a new physical server, operating system and storage (whether from a SAN or directly attached). This means that it is fairly easy to cost the request and charge it against the relevant budget.
The new challenge is how does this work in a virtual environment?
Its very easy to provision a new virtual server, this in itself is a well documented saving in administration but keeping track of every new server, who it belongs to and more importantly who is funding it is very difficult. In fact virtual sprawl is now becoming a serious issue and is putting pressure on Virtual environments that would otherwise have plenty of overhead.
The main problem is that virtual environments are fluid and some of the main benefits of the technology such as VMware’s new “HotAdd” feature mean that administrators can now add vCPU’s and RAM on the fly to underperforming servers.
So we are faced with a scenario where servers are easily created, can have their resource changed dynamically and are not tied to a physical server that is owned by a department. This is fantastic for the business as it means higher infrastructure utilization and all of the other well documented benefits of virtual technology. It does however present an issue for budgeting expansion and breaking down the cost of a virtual environment so the relevant departments are charged accurately.
There are two main issues to consider:
1) The management of server lifecycle (Servers are no longer physical hardware).
2) Cost control of infrastructure expansion and accurate budgeting.
To address the first issue we need to look at how a physical environment is managed, in most cases every server has an owner/department and is then retired once it reaches the end of its life. Servers are now more likely to be retired at the point of operating system upgrade rather than hardware obsolescence and because they are not physically sat in a rack It is easy for them to be forgotten.
So to manage the virtual server estate we need some control, it is important that servers are created with the correct authorisation and that there is clear ownership for the servers entire lifecycle.
Issue two means we need to consider that during the servers lifecycle it is also important to report on its directly assigned resource so that increases in CPU, RAM and storage are measured and charged back accordingly. Also how do we answer questions from the business such as “How much do we budget for the new accounting application?”.
To do both of these things we need to monitor the virtual environment, collect data on the resource being used and report on / analyse this data. In this way we can see the entire server estate, track who owns what and ensure we understand exactly who is using what resource. Perhaps more critically we can over time see where our resource demand is growing fastest and budget accordingly.
In this way it is possible to ensure that all the benefits of virtualisation are realised without any of the pitfalls of uncontrolled infrastructure cost.
The good news is that VMware have just announced “Chargeback” an optional upgrade for Virtual Centre that reports on virtualization costs precisely. Full Details Here
If you have already invested in Infrastructure Management and Monitoring tools such as HP OpenView, DELL OpenManage or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager then you should investigate the Management and Monitoring options available from Veeam which allow you to pull all your information into a single screen for easy analysis. Learn more about Veeam Here
