Virtualise your servers

Posted on 19 Nov 2009 at 11:29

Jon Honeyball walks through the three steps to virtualising servers

So you’ve decided now is the time to virtualise your server functions. Actually, there’s hardly a decision to be made, as servers nowadays should run in virtualised containers and there’s no real downside to such a choice, except for the learning time you’ll need to invest, plus some cash on resources and tools.

At each of the steps we’ll be taking over the next few months on the way to a fully virtualised server and client infrastructure, there’ll be some place where you might want to say “this is enough for now”. And you’ll be right, of course – this is a big pill to swallow in one go and the incremental nature of the move is very welcome.

This month, let’s start out with the simplest step of all: virtualising your servers. After all, without taking this step, we haven’t really started the journey.

First, here are three questions about your motivation that you need to answer to understand how to attack this first stage:

1. Are you virtualising in order to move perfectly happy OSes and applications off your tired old hardware? That hardware might be up to ten years old – there are still lots of Pentium III chips running out there in SME-land – and it’s become a nightmare in terms of reliability.

There are still many systems out there running NT4 and doing sterling work

Its hard disks have been spinning for a decade and are at the very edge of their failure envelope; power supplies have been cooked at Gas Mark 5 for years and their components are overstressed; the build-up of dust and worse inside the chassis has reduced the airflow to a trickle.

This is now essentially skipware, whose total cost has been amortised twice over, but you worry about getting the OS to install onto new hardware, and if it won’t then you might be stuck. There are still many systems out there running NT4 and doing sterling work – you can of course argue over the many benefits of moving to some newer OS, but this stuff just lurks around for years.

Merely putting it onto newer hardware would dramatically improve reliability and reduce the server’s risk profile – the only safe way to do that is by virtualising it.

2. Or are you virtualising to consolidate and reduce costs? Perhaps you want to reduce your off-site hosted rack space costs by reducing the number of slots that you take up.

Take a single modern 1U server box, stuff it with two quad-core processors and 32GB of RAM and you’ll have a monster that’s capable of replacing multiple older servers at lower rental-cost, and it will use a fraction of the power of the old hardware with consequential savings on electricity, air con and so forth.

3. Or maybe you see basic virtualisation as a stepping stone towards a fully virtualised environment, and are planning to come all the way to our logical end point.

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User comments

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By JudginD on 29 Nov 2009

Good article

Good article Jon. This is a great way of introducing virtualisation to those still sitting on the fence.

No no expert in the virtualisation field but have just started to implement it using the brilliant Dell R610. I am astounded by its performance and the performance of the virtual servers.

I investigated ESX and Hyper-V and although I originally wanted the VMWare solution because it appeared to be the solution everyone else went for, I was persuded by a colleague to look deeper at Hyper-V. Thats when I recognised it's more suited to our environment.

My only advise is for those moving to the virtual server world is to look at what solution works for their organisation over and above what opinions are thrown at them from other people who made their bed.

By metalmonkey on 5 Dec 2009

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Jon Honeyball

Jon is one of the UK's most respected IT journalists and a contributing editor to PC Pro since it launched in 1994. He specialises in Microsoft technologies, including client/server and office automation applications.