Last week, I spoke at the Operational Excellence summit on implementing server virtualisation frameworks. An age old topic where it was only in the last 12 months that the market has seen server virtualization move forward towards mainstream adoption.
Server virtualization made data centre consolidation a reality, and technology standards, like web services, have been widely adopted. There is also more computing power available, on demand, and it’s easily accessible over high-speed networks leveraging standards. This provides options for solutions that previously would have been technologically challenging and cost prohibitive.
Server virtualisation is a fundamental step towards progressing onward into the cloud journey. How could this far out concept of cloud computing be attained? Where do we start? These questions were raised several times during the session.
If we were to look at the three main stages of adoption, most clients across the Asia Pacific region are very much still in the infancy stages of Maturity Level Two (2), primarily with resource pooling where clients trial run their production and/or test servers and consolidating a few workloads. Network, storage virtualization are at best, piece meal designs in the overall approach to enterprise architecture. This coupled with the uphill efforts for data collection required to build the cost savings and business case has led many virtualization projects to either not meet the required ROI value expected from server virtualization projects or cost overruns.
Clients spend 80% of the time on the planning process and the actual migration execution is only 20% of the time thus the imperative need to have detailed due diligence and planning in the initial stages. The biggest struggle is in assessing & gathering of inventory data required for both hardware, software and applications across clients to servers, to base lining the performance metrics such as utilisation for CPU, memory and IOPs.
At Datacraft, we have helped clients speed up this initial assessment as well as work out the total cost savings of the project through the use of the local data gathered through solution accelerators that are agentless toolkits with zero foot-print. It was designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments for Microsoft, VMware as well as various Linux flavours. This provides an inventory of heterogeneous client and server environments, as well as provide hardware compatibility assessments, virtualization candidacy recommendations for Windows Server 2008 R2, readiness assessment for the most widely used Microsoft technologies including the latest release of Windows Server 2008R2, Windows 7 and Office 2010.
For example, we can now include comprehensive scans of virtualized platforms on the network, down to component and version information in the form of a Machine Inventory Results Reports, Hardware, Software Summary Reports right to the application layer worksheets such as the Linux Lamp stack for (Apache, MySQL and PHP) discovered through the inventory process and provides the instances, version details, and a count of the number of times a particular version of the software was found in addition to the usual Microsoft SQL environments.
This has helped accelerate the initial due diligence and planning process from weeks to days. Do bring us along on your journey where we can quick start the initial planning, development process and realise the true value early in the process.
Kelvin is responsible for the Microsoft Professional Services (PS) practice in Asia. His charter involves the development and execution of strategies and services, towards growing the Microsoft PS business and market share for the Microsoft line of business. He has more than 15 years of experience and is an avid technologist and humanitarian volunteer helping both enterprises and local communities through the use of technology solutions.
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