taking the next steps with virtualization · virtualization has addressed many of the challenges it...

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Whether your organization is new to virtualization or you’ve been deploying it for years, the reality is that virtualization is a technology that should be a strategic part of your business, now and in the future. What are the use cases driving virtualization’s growth, and what are the important considerations – including hardware and software platforms – that will help you make the most successful choices moving forward? This paper addresses these critical issues, emphasizing opportunities in environments using Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008.

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Taking the NextSteps withVirtualization

2©2012 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Introduction

Business Considerations of Virtualization

Technology Considerations of Virtualization

Putting It All Together

Incremental Consolidation

Improved Agility

Improved Business Continuity

Supporting Legacy Applications

Laying the Cloud Foundation

Conclusion

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IntroductionVirtualization has become mainstream. More than 90 percent of midsize and large businesses have implemented virtualization at some level, according to research conducted by CDW in 2010.1 However, while many organizations have implemented virtualization, there is still tremendous room for growth. In the CDW survey, respondents said roughly a third of their total server infrastructure consisted of virtualized servers.2

Virtualization deployment will continue to grow dramatically, fueled by a variety of factors, including continued use of virtualization to support consolidation efforts; growth of virtualization use in mission-critical applications and workloads; growth in virtualization among small and midsize organizations; successful deployment of virtualization as a strategic initiative to enhance business agility;and virtualization as the foundation for next-generation cloud computing services. IDC has predicted that the compound rate of growth in servers for virtualization will be more than double the growth of the overall server market through 2014.3

1 CDW, The Server Virtualization Life Cycle Report (2010). Based on a market analysis and a survey of 387 information technology executives in organizations with 100 employees or more, CDW found that server virtualization is maturing, as more than 90 percent of businesses have implemented it at some level.2 Organizations reporting that they have “fully deployed” server virtualization reported that only 37 percent of their industry-standard server infrastructure consists of virtual servers.3 Worldwide Market for Enterprise Server Virtualization to Reach $19.3 Billion by 2014, (2010). According to the IDC forecast, more than $19 billion will be spent on server hardware in support of virtualization applications, with shipments of virtualized servers growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14%. This represents an increase at more than twice the rate of the overall server market from 2009 to 2014.


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Virtualization is not only here to stay, but it will continue to be one of the most critical initiatives for IT organizations in businesses of all sizes. As IT decision-makers go through the process of deter-mining how virtualization can be deployed more thoroughly and strategically within their organizations, these are some of the key points they will need to address:

1. What are your ultimate goals with virtualization? Are you content with some of the traditional benefits of virtualization, such as consolidation, or is your “head in the cloud?”

2. Which workloads and applications will you be virtualizing, and why?

3. Is your organization ready to virtualize mission-critical applications?

4. Which virtualization software platform(s) are you considering or using?

5. Have you thought about your virtualization platform from a strategic perspective – in other words, have you considered how virtualization ties into your existing server environment today and how it will tie into your possible transition to the cloud in the future?

6. Which hardware solutions and platforms will deliver the best performance, scalability, ROI and the overall best chance of a successful deployment?

Wherever you are now, and whatever your rationale is for moving forward with virtualization, choosing the right virtualization plat-forms – hardware and software – will be among the most critical


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decisions you will be making to secure your IT infrastructure investment for the future. The reality is that businesses of all shapes and sizes are looking at the benefits that can be delivered by virtualization, including the benefits of cloud computing which can enable increased agility, continuity, scalability and performance, while continuing to keep costs under control.

Business Considerations of VirtualizationVirtualization has addressed many of the challenges IT has faced since the adoption of distributed networks and client/server computing. And with economic conditions unsettled, IT has been charged with doing more with less during the past decade. Virtualization has been a major enabler of consolidation, which helped drive reduced energy costs, reduced complexity and increased efficiencies.

But virtualization can be more than just a tool to save money: It can also become a strategic initiative that helps enable improved business agility and continuity while providing a foundation for next-generation, service-oriented cloud solutions. Among the key business drivers of increased virtualization are:

1. Incremental consolidation

2. The opportunity for improved business and IT agility

3. The opportunity for improved business continuity

4. Support for critical legacy applications and data on newer hardware platforms

5. Creating a pathway for cloud-based services


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Individually, each of these initiatives is an important factor in driving the business value of virtualization. Together, they collectively explain why virtualization has become so important to businesses, and why it will continue to be one of the critical driving factors in IT decision-making for the foreseeable future.

n Incremental Consolidation: For many organizations, consolida-tion efforts were (and are) the primary initial drivers of virtualization. Virtualization has proved to be a successful tool for reducing the number of servers, reducing energy consumption, optimizing IT resources and consolidating space in the data center. While many organizations are using virtualization to help consolidation efforts, there are still many businesses that are new to virtualization and just beginning to understand the potential benefits. In addition, many organizations are only now starting to trust their most im-portant mission-critical applications to virtualized infrastructures, which helping to drive expanded deployment levels and thereby further maximize consolidation efforts.

n Improved IT and Business Agility: It’s hard to overstate the importance of agility in business these days. Organizations and their workers are becoming much more mobile; customers, partners and employees are connected to the business at all times, from any location; and users of all types have come to expect that the business will be adaptable to any device, application or solution they can imagine. We are seeing this with the growth of social networks as a business tool and the deployment of smartphones and tablets for a wide range of business applications. Those IT organizations that are unable to deliver on the promise of a more


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agile business are missing the boat on perhaps the most important trend in IT.

n Improved Business Continuity: In many ways, business conti-nuity goes hand in hand with agility as an important driver of IT investment today. Because of the Internet and the “alwayson” expectations of employees and customers, any downtime or slowdowns in performance can have a significant impact onthe bottom line. Virtualization can provide businesses of all sizes with a built-in alternative for business continuity. Organizations can use virtualization as a means to provide failover protection without having to pay an additional premium for incremental and/or duplicate hardware: Automatic failover is a very attractive benefit of virtualization. Virtualization can also enable a much more rapid rollout of new services and applications, and features such as Live Migration in Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2 help to obviate the need for scheduled downtime when deploying new services and applications.

n Supporting the Past: As you move forward with virtualization, you will need to continue supporting many of your legacy appli-cations, some of which will be absolutely critical in running your business. In general, you want to make sure you have a hardware platform, starting at the processor level, that will provide the most compatibility and support for your legacy apps. You also want to provide the highest levels of performance to support migration of legacy apps to virtualization and, perhaps eventually, the cloud. It’s also important to consider a hypervisor platform that provides the tools and management capabilities that reduce the complexity


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of running legacy applications in a virtualized environment. While virtualization may be your path to the future, you must make sure your environment supports its critical links to the past as well.

n Path to the Cloud: The drive for improved IT and business agilityand business continuity is also one of the factors that is leading to the incredible growth expected for cloud computing, either through private clouds, public clouds or hybrid cloud solutions. Virtualization is a major factor in cloud enablement, providing the shared and configurable computing resources that lead to a much more services-oriented computing infrastructure. If your organi-zation has expectations of deploying any type of cloud services, then you would be wise to consider what portion of your IT environ-ment you wish to virtualize. Many companies find that the more your environment that is virtualized, the more successfully and completely you will be able to move services, applications and business solutions to the cloud.

Technology Considerations of VirtualizationA number of important technology initiatives are helping to drive the growth of virtualization, whether for traditional IT use cases such as consolidation, business continuity or legacy support, or for newer service-based applications such as those enabled by the cloud. Among the most critical of these technological drivers are:

n Innovations Within Processors/Servers: While most IT profes-sionals think of virtualization as a software initiative, those who’ve


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been through the process understand that it is equally important – if not more so – to consider the hardware, particularly at the processor level. When you recognize that consolidation is one of the greatest potential benefits of virtualization efforts, the ability to get maximum performance from your servers at maxi-mum return on investment (ROI) takes on increased importance. For example consider, next-generation processors such as the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processors, which are designed specifically to deliver business agility through the world’s first truly modular x86 core design.

n The Growth of Hyper-V: When Microsoft® upgraded and addedfeatures to Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2, it created tremendousopportunities for companies of all sizes to take advantage of vir-tualization in an extremely cost-efficient manner. For enterprise customers, where Microsoft is already making a serious impact, Hyper-V provides an alternative for new deployments and the op-portunity to support multi-hypervisors within their infrastructure, which has become an important enterprise trend. The ability to deploy Hyper-V cost effectively means that enterprise customers can choose the right hypervisor for the right solution. For small and midsize companies, the availability of Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2 has meant the opportunity to initiate new virtualization deployments and to expand existing deployments. Gartner notes that Microsoft is making gains in the virtualization market among midsize companies.4 Furthermore as small and midsize companies continue to move more aggressively

4 Gartner InSource blog, Gartner Lists Top 10 Technologies for Mid-Size Companies.


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into the virtualization arena, they will also continue to expand their usage of virtualization to mission-critical applications and into the cloud as well.

n Other Hardware Considerations: In addition to considering performance, throughput, scalability, power consumption and other factors at the processor level, it is also important to look at the rest of your hardware infrastructure as you expand your usage of virtualization. The performance of your storage infrastructure and network will help to determine the levels of consolidation you can achieve through virtualization, and will also help to deliver on your goals of improved agility, improved continuity and a more service-oriented IT infrastructure. For example, you will likely need networked storage and will probably want to take advantage of storage solutions such as integrated de-duplication, disk backup and intelligent tiering, among others.

Putting It All TogetherAs noted, there are several key business considerations driving the increased deployment of virtualization: Incremental consolida-tion, improved IT and business agility, improved business continu-ity, support for legacy apps and the opportunity to build a pathway for next-generation cloud computing services. As well, there are important technical considerations that are supporting and abetting virtualization growth, including innovations within processors and servers, the availability and affordability of virtualizations technol-ogies like Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2 and continuedinnovation throughout the rest of the hardware infrastructure,


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such as in networked storage and intelligent tiering and in faster, more stable networks.

So how do these business and technology considerations come together in the real world to enable IT decision-makers to make the most successful choices moving forward, matching the right technology solution with the business use case that is driving that initiative? Here are some of the most important issues to consider.

Incremental ConsolidationWe talk about “incremental consolidation” because, while many organizations have adopted virtualization as a means to consolidate and optimize IT resources, there is still room in most data centers for a lot more infrastructure to be virtualized. When CDW surveyed IT organizations in 2010, companies that reported a “fully deployed” server environment said their actual virtualization deployment was only 37 percent of their infrastructure.5 As organizations become more comfortable with virtualization for mission-critical applications, and as IT teams become more adept at managing/deploying virtualization in general, the number of users, applications, departments and services that rely on virtualized infrastructure will certainly continue to grow.

For IT professionals, the question is how to choose the right hard-ware and software for consolidation efforts, whether for incremental

5 Worldwide Market for Enterprise Server Virtualization to Reach $19.3 Billion by 2014, (2010). According to the IDC forecast, more than $19 billion will be spent on server hardware in support of virtualization applications, with shipments of virtualized servers growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14%. This represents an increase at more than twice the rate of the overall server market from 2009 to 2014.


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or brand new deployments. One of the first and most important decisions is where to upgrade the hardware infrastructure, particu-larly at the server level. The reality is that investing in new servers with next-generation processors will make it easier for you to realize the benefits of your consolidation efforts – performance, speed, optimization, reduced power consumption, CAPEX reduc-tion and overall return on investment ROI will be influenced by your hardware choices.

One of the ways to approach upgrading your servers is to look at the number of cores on your processors. A general rule of thumb is one virtual machine (VM) for each core, so the more processor cores you have, the more VMs you can deploy for each server. To put this another way, a higher density of virtualize machines (VMs) per server means you will likely have fewer physical server than before, which can lead to lower power consumption, and a higher potential ROI. For example, if you were to deploy servers built on the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processors, and if you stick with the “one processor per VM” rule, you could deploy 60 to 100 per-cent more VMs than on a comparable Intel-based platform.6 You could also benefit from a highly scalable server infrastructure to ramp up new VMs as your needs increase.

There are many other advantages to upgrading to servers built on the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors for consolidation

6 Based on comparison of 16-core AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor with 8-core Intel Xeon 7500 Series processor and 10-core Intel Xeon E7 Series processor using one VM per core loading rule. SVR-61


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through virtualization. The AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor features 46 percent lower power per core than the competition.7

Also, the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors offer four memory channels versus the previous two channels on earlier generations of AMD Opteron processors, which means not just a larger bank of memory, but faster performance as well.

In addition to looking at your servers and their processor “building blocks” for virtualization, you will also want to make sure you have upgraded other aspects of your hardware and examined potential cost-reducing opportunities offered through the use of Hyper-V®, particularly in applications/use cases where you are already using the Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2 operating system.

On the hardware side, you can bolster your consolidation efforts by upgrading and potentially virtualizing your storage. On the soft-ware side, by utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 to drive incremental consolidation efforts, you can deploy a much more cost-efficient solution while targeting new virtualization opportuni-ties throughout the organization. Hyper-V offers the opportunity to save significant dollars while also diversifying your virtualization efforts, which will help in delivering improved agility.

Improved AgilityIf consolidation has been one of the core reasons for the rapid growth of virtualization, improved IT and business agility has been

7 Based on AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor with 16 cores at 85W TDP (5.3125W/core) versus lowest wattage, highest core Intel Xeon processor with 6 cores at 60W TDP (10W/core), according to www.intel.com as of November, 2011. SVR-80


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one of the significant side benefits helping drive the demand for increased virtualization. Building a virtualized infrastructure that delivers improved business agility starts at the foundation, with the servers and the processors they are built upon.

What you are looking for in your servers and processors is a strong foundation that delivers the right levels of performance and scal-ability for your business. Performance is critical because business agility often depends upon maximum response time, both in rolling out new services and applications and in supporting customers and workers using existing virtualized services.

One of the opportunities available to organizations today is the ability to design a system to avoid bottlenecks through what is called “straight-through computing.”

Straight-through computing helps ensure that there are no bottle-necks or compromises by giving each of up to sixteen threads their own dedicated processing resources when computing de-mands increase so that compute-intensive embedded applications don’t have contention between integer threads. Such a benefit is available thanks to the design architecture of the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor, which was designed for dedicated high-speed throughput. For performance and scalability, all memory runs at full speed on all models, all interprocessor communications happen at the highest speed on all models, and up to 16 threads per CPU have 100 percent access to their own integer resources when workload demands increase.


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Reducing the complexity of managing your virtualized IT infrastruc-ture is another important factor in helping deliver increased IT and business agility. For maximum agility, you want a centralized management platform that can handle multiple virtualized environments.

Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Manager, for example, enables that type of enhanced agility while supporting rapid provisioning, operational automation and dynamic resource optimization across multiple platforms. Microsoft® also enables full monitoring and management of the virtualization environment through System Center Operations Manager. IT departments can monitor physical hosts, storage environments, VM operating systems and appli-cations inside the virtual machines through a single console that seamlessly integrates with the Virtual Machine Manager Service.

Improved Business ContinuityImproved business continuity is another side benefit that is con-tinuing to drive new and incremental virtualization deployments. Nearly 60 percent of IT professionals use virtualization to support disaster recovery and improved continuity of operations, according to the CDW survey cited above.8 Virtualization can enable improvedcontinuity for all businesses through features such as automatic failover, live migration, snapshots and the ability to quickly get VMs back up and running in the event of a failure or downtime.

8 CDW, The Server Virtualization Life Cycle Report (2010). Based on a market analysis and a survey of 387 information technology executives in organizations with 100 employees or more, CDW found that server virtualization is maturing, as more than 90 percent of businesses have implemented it at some level.


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These types of features are beneficial to companies of all sizes, small and medium-size businesses, may find them to be extremely helpful in reducing costs by providing replication and failover capabilities that they either did not deploy in the past or, if they did deploy, required that they pay a premium for incremental and/or duplicative hardware, software and support.

Starting again at the building blocks of your infrastructure, what are the key features of your processors that will help to enable improved business continuity? One of the biggest opportunities is to build your infrastructure on a platform that provides consis-tency from generation to generation of processors, particularly for features such as Live Migration.

As a general rule, most organizations are not going to do a com-plete server refresh each time they upgrade their virtualization efforts, so there will be many instances where there will be different generations of servers in the same shop, ostensibly working together to create the optimal VM environment. If you are losing from server to server features that enable virtualization, you are certainly not maximizing your environment or providing consistent business continuity across the infrastructure. You also want to focus on issues such as performance and consolidation for improved business continuity because faster and more stable performance means less downtime.

Other hardware opportunities to bolster business continuity come from advances in storage performance during recent years. Network storage can provide increased throughput for higher performance, and features such as de-duplication and intelligent


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tiering as well as increased use of high-performance disk backup can improve the efficiency of the entire storage infrastructure and can provide much improved response time in the event of a disaster or other failure. Using these advanced storage features in a virtualized environment can dramatically reduce the time required to recover from failures, which is what business continuity is all about.

On the software side, businesses can certainly benefit from the business continuity features that Microsoft® added to Hyper-V® when it upgraded the hypervisor as part of Microsoft® Hyper-V® 2008 R2. For example, VMs managed by the Failover Cluster feature can be configured for high availability. If there is a failure in the physical or virtual infrastructure, the Windows Failover Cluster can detect the problem and bring on a new VM on a sur-viving cluster node. Live Migration enhances business continuity by allowing IT to transparently move running VMs from one node cluster to another node in the same cluster without a dropped network connection or any perceived downtime. In addition, Live Migration enables IT to perform hardware maintenance without any scheduled downtime.

Supporting Legacy ApplicationsVirtualization provides organizations with an opportunity to improve the reliability and performance of legacy applications by migrating legacy operating systems and applications to virtual machines. While IT professionals may be concerned that their business-critical applications are married to the underlying hardware, the realty is


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that virtualizing an application is different from re-platforming and is a much simpler undertaking.

Virtualization can provide straightforward migration path for moving legacy applications to enable them to take advantage of newer and faster hardware – especially multicore CPUs and multiprocessor systems, as noted by online resource Search Server Virtualization.9

Furthermore, virtualization may even help improve legal applica-tion performance as a result of, moving them to more powerful and current hardware platforms and positioning them to deliver the type of service-centric IT environment that is promised by next-generation cloud computing.

Virtualization can enable this migration by retaining the separation and runtime attributes of each legacy compute load in its own virtual machine, along with an instance of the legacy OS version, libraries, middleware and other software the legacy apps require in order to function correctly, according to Search Server Virtual-ization. In many cases, the legacy system software can migrate intact, bit for bit, and require no further integration, quality assurance or validation.

The scenario described above “offers more than just an opportu-nity to consolidate hardware and improve performance – it can confer legacy loads with better uptime and greater overall reliability.”10 One of the keys in making this transition of legacyapplications successful is to take advantage of the state-of-the-art

9 Search Server Virtualization, Leveraging Legacy IT with Virtualization (2008)10 Search Server Virtualization, Leveraging Legacy IT with Virtualization (2008)

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Leveraging-legacy-IT-with-virtualization

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Leveraging-legacy-IT-with-virtualization


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advances in microprocessor technology to maximize your core count, performance and scalability. As noted by Search Server Virtualization, “Most migration target hardware is chosen precisely because it outperforms the legacy boxes and boards it replaces, in some cases, by large factors.” This makes a strong case for considering servers built on the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processors, which offer the highest core counts in the industry as well as significantly improved performance versus previous AMD Opteron™ processor generations.

Laying the Cloud FoundationAs you take the next steps with virtualization, you may be asking where it will lead. Perhaps you started with consolidation and turned that into an initiative that is looking to reduce costs, energy consumption and space requirements, while at the same time making your business more agile, with improved availability and uptime.

For many organizations, the next step will be to take this virtualized infrastructure and move toward a much more service-oriented approach to IT, where some of the attributes of virtualization – shared resources, consolidated and centralized management, and increased automation – will impact the entire business through the deployment of cloud services. Indeed, few would argue against the idea that cloud computing is where virtualization is leading us. According to Forrester Research, the global cloud computing market will reach $241 billion by the end of the decade, compared with about $40 billion at the beginning of the decade.11

11 Forrester Research, Sizing the Cloud (2011)


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It is in the deployment of this more services-oriented IT where all of the previous benefits of virtualization – consolidation, improved agility and improved business continuity – can come together to create a new paradigm for IT professionals and the businesses they serve. This is why building the proper foundation, on the most efficient and highest performance hardware, can be such an important decision for IT decision-makers today.

In preparing your infrastructure for the cloud, will likely want a platform that offers the highest level of performance and the highestnumber of cores; a consistent architecture across processor gen-erations; an architecture that has been designed specifically for a virtualized environment; and a vendor, that continues to lead the way in delivering the most advanced features and functionality for virtualized computing environments. Solutions from AMD can offer all of these attributes.

For example, AMD’s latest generation of processors, the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor, offers the industry’s leading core densities, providing a rich mix of performance for highly threaded cloud applications. By delivering the most cores in the industry, the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor delivers on the requirements of a highly scalable infrastructure that is demanded through the elastic needs of cloud workloads.

ConclusionVirtualization has become ubiquitous because it is solving some of the most challenging problems faced by IT and business leaders during the past decade: overprovisioning of IT resources, server


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sprawl, poor optimization, bloated space, high energy consump-tion and increased complexity in managing the IT infrastructure.

As IT professionals look ahead, however, they can see clearly that virtualization is much more than just a problem-solver – it can also be a driver of new business initiatives and a technology solution that enables organizations to be more agile, responsive and prof-itable. In order to take advantage of all that virtualization has to offer, however, it is important to put the proper foundation in place for the most efficient, cost-effective and highest performing virtualized infrastructure.

The foundation starts (no pun intended) at the core, with the microprocessors in the physical servers, and extends through the rest of the hardware foundation and into choice of hypervisor platform and vendor. A large part of how the server performs, and how the virtualized infrastructure performs, will be traced back to the microprocessors on which the servers are built, impacting everything from price and performance to power demands, flex-ibility and scalability. Choosing a processor platform that has been designed from the ground up to deliver optimum virtualization performance can be a real key in determining the success of your deployment in delivering many of the benefits outlined in this report, including incremental consolidation, agility, continuity, support for legacy applications and support for next-generation cloud services.

Even if you are already highly virtualized, there is room for growth and expansion with the increased movement into cloud-based IT services. If you are just starting out on the virtualization journey


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©2012 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Opteron, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft, Windows, and Hyper-V are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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or are just starting to move virtualization to mission-critical appli-cations, you will find many opportunities to move the virtualization needle forward. Now is the time to make the right platform choices for the future. A great place to start is to consider the industry’s leading next-generation hardware platform, the AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor, in conjunction with Microsoft’s latest generation virtualization platform, Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2. Virtualization is more about building for the future than fixing the challenges of the past. Now is the time to build toward a new future. n

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