11 golden rules for virtualisation

The 12th Golden Rule

This was a very interesting article, however I think there is a very important first step that was missed out which is to discover, map and create an inventory of your network resources first.

A layer 2/3 discovery tool, such as WhatsUp WhatsConnected, will identify not only the physical server that you have deployed in your environment, but how everything is connected down to the individual port. This process is actually an eye opener for many organisations, because you can discover pieces of unaccounted hardware, or even inter-device connections that you didn’t even know they were there.

Once you have a hardware inventory in place, you can use it to document your network for auditing purposes or simply to try to reduce costs by repurposing or moving to the cloud underutilised resources. And since networks are “living entities”, don’t forget to re-run your discovery on a periodic basis (more frequently if you are part of a larger organisations, or if you have distributed network locations) and export this information into other tools such as Visio or Excel for continuous use throughout your organisation.

By Ipswitch_WUG on 6 Aug 2010

@Ipswitch_WUG

Thanks for the advert!

By milliganp on 9 Aug 2010

Very Poor Show chaps

If you have a product to advertise then advertise it, or propose that we do a proper comparative review. Don't stick an irrelevant comment on an unrelated piece of coverage: it makes you and your product look like unsolicited Chinese spam artists, and most likely does more damage than benefit. Talking about inventory in response to an article on virtualisation is a monumental non sequitur; I don't need to inventory my whole network before I virtualise my lone Exchange Server. By all means, mail me a link to an eval copy of your inventory product and I'll give it a look-over.

By Steve_Cassidy on 9 Aug 2010

It is recommended practice to inventory all your servers that are to be virtualised. If it's a lone server then not much point (in either performing an inventory or virtualising it) but when you're virtualising 20+ you need to get an idea of resources required, lun sizing, bandwidth, the list goes on... only saying this because if I did a proper inventory to start with then I wouldn't of had to rebuild my luns due to iSCSI disk latency.

However... you don't need software to do an inventory. Just a count of servers, services provided, how many users they serve and factor in room for growth.

Not much but still a valid step.

By JmLing on 9 Aug 2010

That would be why I suggested that people prototype their setup. You also mention "LUNs", which means you are in iSCSI world. That's two orders of magnitude larger than the target I have in mind for these rules. At the small scale, I'd be really quite scared if someone needed to run an inventory - that means they are not familiar enough with the pre-virtualisation machine to evaluate what their prototype delivers.

By Steve_Cassidy on 9 Aug 2010

Alternate 12th Rule

Perhaps a better alternate 12th rule is don't keep puting Virtualisation off!
Alternately virtualise all NEW machines, even if it's at very low (even 1:1) ratios. Virtalised machines are much easier to resize, move or repurpose than physical machines -and you're not increasing the future need for p2v.

By milliganp on 12 Aug 2010