ToutVirtual Enterprise Virtualization - A Proper Virtual World

The Risk of Virtualization

February 12th, 2008

Virtualization, Fine, Well Sort Of? - Chapter 05

Let us consider the following situation…You walk into a conference room, before you are a group of your key clients, lines of businesses, what ever is applicable to your situation, and you ask the following questions:

• What percentage of your technology infrastructure is virtualized?
• Are you happy with the performance of virtualization?
• Do you consider virtualization a higher risk? If so, Why?
• Do you consider virtualization a lower risk? If so, Why?
• What is the true risk of this percentage of virtualization?
• Does the phrase “All Eggs in One Basket” meaning anything to you?
• Is the risk of virtualization worth the threat of virtualization?

What do you think the answers will be? Are you going to be happy with the answers? Are your clients going to be able to answer the questions? If they can not, is it your fault or theirs?

What is the percentage of your technology infrastructure is virtualized? This is a straight-forward question, or is it? Does your firm or infrastructure provider use virtualized storage? Does your solution use hypervisor or application virtualization?  Is your network virtualized? VLANs, QoS, etc., What? What the heck is that? Hypervisor and/or application virtualization, which is safer? Many clients have no real understanding that every information technology resource they contract for is virtualized in some way. It may be that what you think are LANs, are VLANs. It may be that what you think is physical infrastructure is, but not completely, what if you network or storage provider has their entire command-center tool set on virtualized instances and they are suffering from the same issues you are? You just don’t know what is virtualized below what you see as infrastructure.

Are you happy with the performance of virtualization? This is also a straight forward question, maybe the only straight-forward question in this entire discussion, or virtualization in general. From a quantitative perspective, providing you have rather extensive analysis methods, you can provide your clients with hard facts, from P2V, V2I, I2I, I2V, I2P, V2P, etc. But from a qualitative perspective the client is going to believe what they believe. Of course, from the client perspective, you get what you pay for, so if you can live with the performance virtualization provides, versus the cost of not using virtualization, this relatively straight forward. Did or does your process for virtualization candidacy force your project managers and design personnel to do proof-of-concept validation of virtualization? Or do you just trust the application vendors?

What is the true risk of the percentage of virtualization? Higher Risk? Lower Risk? We are not talking labs or non-critical environments but core production, the mission critical, the five (5) nines (9) realm of up time. No, not disaster recovery on virtualization, but true production, customer visible, if offline, you lose real money. Do your clients really understand this? Or did you just, ah, sort of, gloss over this point? This is not an argument for or against virtualization, because depending on your respective analysis, design, and implementation, this true risk could or should be less than traditional hardware, no? Transparent migration, i.e. VMotion for VMware, and/or stand-by hosts, or just available capacity on existing hosts? Not to mention network redundancy methods, 3DNS, Big-IP, etc. Storage redundancy infrastructure or methods? Argues the point that virtualization should have lower risk than traditional hardware. However, if you cut corners, or have non-shared storage, did not make the commitment to redundant network and storage fabric implementations? Then the risk of virtualization is higher than traditional hardware for sure, if you do not believe this, keep smoking what your are smoking. It is rather ironic that many clients do not really understand that they have many eggs in one basket on every virtual host server. The virtualization industry knows this, HA, DRS, SRM from VMware, and similar technologies or methods under development by every major virtualization solution provider, just screams this point no? Why was the biggest AH! At VMworld 2007 transparent host redundancy? Microsoft has learned this lesson a bit late, but to be sure Microsoft will never make that specific mistake again, of course I refer to the lack of a transparent virtual instance migration, or VMotion like feature set.

Taking all these questions and associated issues as potential impacts to your environment, is the risk of virtualization worth the thread of virtualization to your financial success? Returning to our conference room, let us up the stakes, what if it is really not a client conference, a board room meeting? Do you want to be the one that has to defend the use of virtualization when something significant goes wrong? Or worse, defend that you short-changed, or rushed to virtualization implementation? It does give pause to you does it not?

Now consider the concept of risk in virtualization, taking into account that hypervisor based operating systems are rather immature compared to traditional operating systems. Are we all just dodging the bullet? Will this risk get us in the end? Real issues for virtualization are and continue to be those of an immature platform, I will not exhaustively itemize these issues, but just think back to the early days of Windows or Linux, and you will recall the things that gave you pain, no? Rush to market code, inexperienced code development, hardware vendors struggling to understand a software operating system that is a moving target, etc., etc., I recall these and more in every operating system ever developed.

The bottom-line in avoiding risk is before your virtualization plan is invoked, why? Because regardless of how good the virtualization platform or your design around said platform is, it is people that designed it. If you have not given your people the time, resources, and had the patience to allow a superior design work to be done, your virtualization infrastructure is a house-of-cards. Once it is implemented, no matter how well it is supported, if the design is bad, the risk you are taking is bad. So I ask again, do your clients know this?

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