If you haven’t already started to virtualize your infrastructure, there is a good chance you will soon. With the official release of Microsoft’s type 1 hypervisor called Hyper V and the recent announcement by VMWare they are giving away their own type 1 hypervisor - ESXi, it is a great time to virtualize. Do a quick search on Google and you’ll see the benefits of virtualization are numerous.

A common question I get asked is how to get started with virtualization and my answer is always the same – assess what you have and tune your current infrastructure. The tuning component is very important as I have found that the majority of virtualization projects companies adopt are of the phased deployment type. This means their current production infrastructure continues to run while the virtualization environments are brought online. In conjunction with this, it has also been my experience that most companies interested in virtualizing want to reuse as much of their current physical infrastructure as possible (new switches, sans and servers typically aren’t in the budget). With these two common requirements, it is very important you have a fully optimized network infrastructure before embarking on your virtualization deployments.

Things to include in your assessment:

• Standard performance monitoring statistics on all of your systems – from the switches and firewalls to the servers and storage, looking for bottlenecks and other areas of inefficiency,
• Document things like current cpu utilization on all of your servers, memory utilization and swapping statistics,
• Input/Output stats (IOPS) of your storage devices,
• Backplane saturation of your switches and trunk lines.

These steps help when optimizing your current infrastructure allowing it to handle the new load placed on devices by virtual machines. It also gives you a complete picture of what you have to work with when you start designing your overall virtualization infrastructure setup.

Once the assessment is done (and keep in mind virtualization allows you to separate the application from the underlying hardware), you can now go through and start dividing your components into resource pools. This allows you to focus on creating a high performance, highly available and highly scalable computing “grid” for your virtual environment.

Kevin McGarry serves as the senior systems analyst at Eureka Software Solutions. Please contact Kevin if you have any questions about this news article or questions about IT service offerings. Call Kevin at 512-459-9292 ext. 291 or email him at kevinm@eurekasoft.com.