Server virtualization is a common deployment in Indian companies. Commercial houses want to
avoid physical servers, and paying through the nose for power and cooling, notwithstanding the
ever-increasing real-estate prices. While going about virtual
server training, you can start with a set of systems lying around. Pre-install it with a
virtualization software and test. This should be done purely from the learning and testing
perspective and not from the production system's view. Once you have hands-on experience on the
software, you can work on the implementation.
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The next step is to install server virtualization
software. You have a wide choice of vendors, including VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. Whenever you
are going in for a virtual
server in your organization, the choice of software should be solution-oriented, not
product-oriented.
Find out what your company requirements are. Choose the software based on your requirements and
costs. The best way out is to have an IT policy in place, as there will be no discipline without
this. Ensure that whenever you are going about server virtualization, there is a blue-print
available in front of you. This will help you to know the various tasks and ensure that a certain
task 'A' should necessarily be completed to satisfy task 'B'.
After installing the servers, have a set of pilot testers who access them within the network. Virtual
server training should be within a private domain where they can do the testing and then these
pilot testers give feedback. For maintaining the new infrastructure your IT team can get an IT
implementer on board. In addition, there are product-based websites on the Internet that you can
refer.
One of the problems with server virtualization is storage. With multiple workloads coming from the
physical source, hiccups over random input-output are possible. Treat the virtualized server as a
real physical server. Whenever storage or network bandwidth or any kind of operating system
resources are being assigned by a particular virtualized server that contain all the virtual
machines being accessed by the client, the administrators of those servers must keep in mind that a
virtual server is only limited to the capacity which is there on the physical server. So, it
shouldn't be over-burdened.
Ensure that the disk resource allocation (which happens when the server has a huge hard disk) is
shared network attached storage. This will enable all these virtual machines to communicate with
each other from a common storage, saving multiple hard drives on each virtual machine-dedicated
set.
About the author: Anil Mahadev is a strategic visionary on database, virtualization (VMware
and Hyper-V) and competitive product research strategy' working as an independent technical
solutions architect (databases and virtualization technologies).
(As told to Anuradha Ramamirtham)
This was first published in August 2010