Virtualization enables companies of any size to achieve greater measures of business agility and cost effectiveness. It also offers a range of advantages for transforming an IT department from a source of expense to a tool for greater corporate profit. But along with the benefits that accrue with implementing virtualization, new issues can arise. For example, effectively combining disparate virtualization products to work cooperatively, maintaining high availability (HA) when moving data centers, and performing server and  application maintenance during business hours are just a few of the newer challenges companies face as they virtualize aspects of  their data center.

 Although the complexity of navigating further into the virtualization landscape can seem daunting, a range of products and options exist that can aid the expansion process.

Making Virtualization Work for You 

Virtualization has offered promise to companies for a variety of reasons. It can help reduce IT expenses, enables rapid application deployment, and streamlines the disaster recovery (DR) process, to name a few. Moreover, automated maintenance in a virtualized environment can simplify data center processes, ultimately easing IT administrative headaches.

 In general, virtualization works by centralizing applications on one or comparatively few physical servers. Then, individual applications can access resources from virtual operating systems across a corporate network. The ability of applications to dynamically access resources according to demand and availability is one of the benefits of having virtualized servers. However, it also increases the number of single failure points and this can have significant implications for the disaster recovery (DR) process.

 Traditionally, DR has relied on data backed up and stored on hard formats, such as tape or disk, which are then safeguarded. But once a physical disaster, such as a server outage or flood occurs, the process of backup and data restoration from these formats can be both time-consuming and cumbersome. For example, new equipment must be ordered and delivered or hardware must be repaired and sometimes re-located within an entirely new datacenter.

 In the case of virtualization, recovery time objectives (RTOs) can be significantly reduced due to quicker data restoration. Moreover, restoring data directly to a virtual machine (VM) or moving to virtual backup and recovery via networked storage, bypasses the limitations related to physical formats. For example, in contrast to relying on a single storage hardware unit, as in traditional data restoration, virtualization makes use of either storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS).

In these formats, storage is made available as though it originated from a single device when in actuality several storage devices are being used. Once a disaster has occurred, quick access to multiple virtualized storage devices translates to faster data retrieval. Your company’s robust high availability (HA) depends upon exactly this kind of dynamic rebounding that virtualization can offer. This, in turn, will lead to a higher functioning workforce and more satisfied customers.

 Undoubtedly, many benefits exist to expanding the role of virtualization for your company. However, it pays to be cautious about areas of expansion that can lead to virtual machine (VM) sprawl. This results from rapid over-deployment of VMs and can seriously detract from data center efficiency. For example, VMs can be created, moved, copied, and reconfigured quickly and relatively easily. As a result, your virtualized environment can soon grow out of control if mismanaged, or if not enough attention is paid to the consolidation process.

 Although virtualization can provide a data center with dynamic flexibility for handling applications and users, certain basic tasks such as backups need to be maintained. With regular backup procedures in place, your company can seamlessly provide efficient HA should any type of disaster occur. In addition, it’s important to design your virtual environment well in advance and to focus on key growth areas of your company that will benefit from server consolidation in the future.