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July 10, 2009

Assess Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturityby James Staten and Galen Schreckfor Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

www.forrester.com

© 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

ExEcutIVE SuMMArYWhy are most organizations not achieving more with infrastructure virtualization? They just aren’t ready to. Through more than 200 enterprise interviews, correlated with survey data, Forrester has identified four clear stages of infrastructure virtualization maturity that dictate readiness for various management and automation technologies, process improvements that must be made, and standardizations that have to be realized to achieve greater gains. Organizations progress fro m gaining acclimation with the technology, to strategically standardizing on it, through a period of chaotic VM sprawl that leads to process improvements, on to the point of pooling and policy-based automation. This last phase is akin to the processes followed by providers of cloud computing platforms. These improvements can’t be fast tracked — enterprises must go through each stage as they gain experience. But once you identify your stage of maturity there are clear steps you can take to move to the next stage.

tAblE OF cOntEntSAre You Getting The Most From Your Server Virtualization Investments?

Your level Of Experience Dictates Your readiness to Advance Server Virtualization

Where Are You Today? How Do You Transition To The Next Stage?

Getting to Stage 2: Just Do It

Getting to Stage 3: Focus On better Process And Automation

Moving up to Stage 4: think like A cloud Service Provider

But Aren’t Clouds A Fast Track To Stage 4?

rEcOMMEnDAtIOnS

Pace Yourself: Rushing Forward Is Fraught With Challenges

WHAt It MEAnS

Maturity Gets Your Organization Cloud-Ready

Supplemental Material

nOtES & rESOurcESForrester crafted this analysis through interviews and inquiries with more than 200 enterprise It leaders and through our It consolidation workshop. Vendors interviewed for this research include: Accenture, Akorri, Amazon Web Services, At&t, blADE network technologies, citrix Systems, Egenera, HP, IbM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, tIbcO Software, rackspace, Verizon business, and VMware.

Related Research Documents“best Practices: Aligning Your Infrastructure And Operations Department Around Virtualization” March 20, 2009

“Why Isn’t Server Virtualization Saving us More?”January 28, 2009

“the Forrester Wave™: It consolidation consultancies, Q2 2008”June 13, 2008

July 10, 2009

Assess Your Infrastructure Virtualization MaturityHere’s How to Move to the next Stageby James Staten and Galen Schreckwith rachel A. Dines, Simon Yates, and Frank Gillett

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mailto:[email protected]

www.forrester.com

www.forrester.com

http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=47320&src=48377pdf





© 2009, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction ProhibitedJuly 10, 2009

Assess Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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ARe YOu GeTTING THe MOST FROM YOuR SeRVeR VIRTuAlIzATION INVeSTMeNTS?

Most of the enterprises that Forrester speaks with confess that they are only attaining a small portion of the potential benefits server virtualization promises.1 But most organizations can’t simply ratchet up the utilization and turn on policy-based automation overnight. Maturing your server virtualization practices requires changes to the IT organization, management tools, processes used, and most of all, a much greater comfort with the technology that only comes through experience.

Your level Of experience Dictates Your Readiness To Advance Server Virtualization

Through more than 200 client interviews and inquiries, Forrester has determined that the use of virtualization follows a pattern of experience that breaks down into four stages of maturity. Most organizations must pass through each stage of maturity to prepare for the next stage, and this process helps prepare for the next level of automation, implementation, and evolution. In a nutshell, the stages break down as follows (see Figure 1):

· Stage 1: All organizations start with a period of acclimation. Most companies start down the path of server virtualization by learning about the technology and how it works, testing it against simple applications, and determining where it can be safely applied. In this phase, implementation nearly always starts with test and development systems before moving gingerly into production. It is here that the disaster recovery (DR) capabilities are first tested on less critical applications. During the acclimation phase, IT typically virtualizes applications that are considered easy targets, because they have low business impact, few users, and minimal performance requirements. Server consolidation and DR are the primary reasons for the investment, and so long as immediate gains are shown, the organization can begin to move toward stage 2.

· Stage 2: Experimentation moves to a strategy of consolidation. In stage 2, organizations grow more comfortable with the concept, maturity, and stability of their chosen server virtualization technology and begin to shift to a more strategic implementation. This stage is most easily identified when an organization shifts its default deployment mindset from server to virtual server, also known as a “virtual first” policy.2 At this point the organization is no longer making a business case for why a workload should be virtualized but instead is pushing back and asking for a business case for why a workload should get its own server.

· Stage 3: Virtualization empowers process improvement. In stage 2, the business starts leveraging the unique benefits of the virtualization infrastructure features, such as live migration, backup services, resource scheduling, and VM templates. In stage 3, the growing use of these technologies leads to improvements in key processes such as change management, incident management, and deployment.3 However, the core processes used by these organizations must adapt to take full advantage of these technologies, because it is in this phase that organizations begin to experience VM sprawl, where the number of VMs under

© 2009, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited July 10, 2009


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management grows dramatically and the preexisting processes simply can’t manage the growth effectively. During this phase, organizations begin to get serious about life-cycle management of VMs. In stage 3, firms will also virtualize high-performance applications where there may be no hardware cost savings. Even though the VM occupies an entire physical server, the benefits to ongoing management and DR make it worthwhile.

· Stage 4: Processes turn into policies, and automation takes over. As processes mature and evolve to take advantage of virtualization technologies, organizations discover that the key to managing VM sprawl is policy-based automation that reduces the manual labor in the virtualized pool, driving up client self-service. As virtualization proliferates and automation moves to higher and higher level tasks, the organization begins to manage its virtual environment as a pool, which prepares it to treat this pool as an internal cloud service. Before proceeding, you must first be able to completely control and understand your environment.

Figure 1 the Four Stages Of Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 48377

Stage 1: Acclimation• Get comfortable with it as a concept and tool• Deploy for test/dev• Deploy for non-business-critical DR• Some production deployments — but tactical• No change to operations processes• Limited virtualization tool deployments

Stage 2: Strategic consolidation• Comfortable with concept, use, maturity, stability• Shift mindset from server to virtual server• Spread production deployments widely• Begin deployment for some business-critical DR• Painfully transition from server sprawl to virtual

server life-cycle management• Experimenting with VMotion and Distributed

Resource Scheduler (DRS)

Stage 3: Process improvement• Using VMotion, starting to trust DRS• Can utilization rates be increased?• Deploy for business-critical DR• Begin bifurcating applications between priority

and nonpriority• Developing new operational efficiencies• Process improvement spreading/butting up

against network, storage, security, development

Stage 4: Pooling and automation• Trust DRS• Implementing production policies for automation• Some mission-critical DR deploys• Pooling and internal cloud development• Chargeback/utility tracking• SLA and QoS focus



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WHeRe ARe YOu TODAY? HOW DO YOu TRANSITION TO THe NexT STAGe?

Forrester’s Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2008, shows that nearly 40% of enterprises now have at least two years of experience with server virtualization (see Figure 2). With two years of experience behind them, most of these firms should be able to move to stage 2 if they can accelerate their deployments with better incentives to business customers. Eleven percent of our respondents had three years of experience, and 7% had four years of experience. Interviews with these organizations indicate the majority are in stage 2, which suggests at least a two-year time frame for organizations to transition fully into this stage of maturity. However, time is not the only factor — while it is important during the initial acclimation phases, the 14% of firms with five years of experience or more are not guaranteed to reach higher stages of maturity. In fact, many have not progressed beyond stages 2 or 3 (see Figure 3).

So where is your organization? And what does it take to mature to each stage? The keys are experimentation, constantly growing experience, willingness to change the organization and your internal processes, and gaining the political capital to bring the rest of the business forward with you. This last point cannot be overlooked, since internal politics and organizational resistance can hinder your use of virtualization. Start by assessing your current maturity stage, and then take the necessary steps to move to the next level (see Figure 4).

Figure 2 Most Enterprises Have two Or More Years’ Experience With Virtualization


5 years or more

About 4 years

About 3 years

About 2 years

About 1 year

Less than a year 7%

17%

38%

11%

7%

14%

Base: 212 hardware decision-makers at North American and European enterprises that havealready implemented x86 server virtualization(”Don’t know” responses have been removed)

“For approximately how long has your company used x86 server virtualization?”

Source: Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2008



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Figure 3 the Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity continuum


21-30 VMs per physical host

10-20 VMs per physical host

<10 VMs per physical host

Stage 1:Acclimation

Stage 2:Consolidation

Stage 3:Process

improvement

Stage 4:Policies and automation

Firms implementing ITIL

Production systems virtualized

Virtual server host utilization target

31+ VMs per physical host



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Figure 4 Forrester’s Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity Assessment


Criteria

Implementation

Processes

Total implementation score:

Score explanations Scores

What percentage of your test or development environment is virtual?

What percentage of your production environment is virtual?

What percentage of your mission-critical servers is virtual?

Do you have an executive sponsor for your virtualization implementation?

Do you boot all VMs from networked storage?

What is your virtual server host utilization target?

How many virtual machines do you deploy on one physical host?

1 = 0-25% 2 = 26-50% 3 = 51-75% 4 = 76-100%

1 = 0-25% 2 = 26-50% 3 = 51-75% 4 = 76-100%

1 = 0-25% 2 = 26-50% 3 = 51-75% 4 = 76-100%

1 = <10%2 = 10-30%3 = 31-60%4 = >60%

1 = <102 = 10-203 = 21-304 = 31+

0 = No 3 = Yes

0 = No 1 = Yes

0 = No 2 = Yes

Do you utilize live migration?

0 = No 2 = Yes Do you utilize automated resource scheduling (e.g., VMware DRS)?

Implementation score

Process score

Total maturity score x 2 = +

Stage 1 = 1-25 points Stage 2 = 26-50 points Stage 3 = 51-75 points Stage 4 = 76-100 points

The spreadsheet detailing this model is available online.



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Figure 4 Forrester’s Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity Assessment (cont.)


Total process score:

0 = No2 = Yes

0 = No2 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No2 = Yes

0 = No2 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

0 = No2 = Yes

0 = No1 = Yes

Have virtual servers reduced the number of people or tools required todeploy new systems?

Have you used virtual servers to simplify day-to-day tasks like patching orsystem changes??

Are you virtualizing applications even if they require a dedicated VM host?

Have you financially accounted for the benefits of virtualization to yourorganization?

Have you set up improved SLAs for your virtual environment (e.g., betteravailability)?

Do you charge back or allocate costs based on virtual resource consumption?

Are you using virtualization-optimized management tools for VM backups?

Are you using virtualization-optimized management tools for VM monitoring?

Are you using virtualization-optimized management tools for VM migrations?

Are you using virtualization-optimized management tools for capacityplanning?

Are you using virtualization-optimized management tools for highavailability?

Does every VM that you deploy start with an approved template from a formallibrary that is maintained and updated centrally?

Do your testing and development VMs all have expiration dates?

Have you implemented a self-service portal for provisioning VMs?

Have you implemented a “virtual first” policy?

Do you have a virtual infrastructure architect on staff?

0 = No1 = YesDo you utilize VM templates to propagate changes into production?



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Getting To Stage 2: Just Do It

Stage 1 companies must gain enough experience with server virtualization to understand how to properly apply the technology for immediate gain and defend its use to skeptical developers and business unit managers. The current recession helps, because the server consolidation gains it brings deliver immediate effect. Organizations in this stage find themselves testing each and every application to prove to their clients that server virtualization doesn’t inhibit performance or availability. A degree of this activity is necessary to gain enough experience and enough wins under your belt to sway the naysayers to your cause. Once complete, you can begin to make the strategic shift to virtual servers as the standard deployment. To make this shift fully, you must:

· Demonstrate the cost and efficiency benefits of virtualization. Although consolidation gains may only be minor at first (2-to-1 consolidations, up to 5-to-1), these gains must be quantified so that business and IT leadership realize the financial benefits achieved. A mid-size regional bank demonstrated more than $1.5 million in avoided capital expenditure due to server virtualization, which helped it earn executive buy-in as it transitioned from stage 2 to stage 3. Similarly, a large public financial institution saves $10,000 for every three servers that are virtualized. Soft benefits, such as server instance-to-admin ratio improvements, faster time to deployment and recovery, and less downtime, are important to document as well.4

· Leverage virtualization for disaster recovery. Most noncritical applications are not protected by disaster recovery plans due to cost. Server virtualization changes this equation, bringing 5- to 20-minute recovery to these applications. You must demonstrate this in transition to stage 2, because to make the strategic shift to virtualizing all x86 workloads you will need to show that the technology can be used to extend DR benefits and make the argument that it can lower the costs of recovery for business-critical applications.

“Our major challenge continues to be getting the business to migrate to virtual machines. We have been trying to show them that their costs will be lower and that functionality such as high availability (HA) and failing over host to host will reduce downtime.” (I&O manager, large insurance company)

· Gain experience with virtualization management tools. While you must use your hypervisor vendor’s management tool, it is equally important to deploy tools that facilitate VM backup, monitoring, physical to virtual migrations, and capacity planning tools that help you handle larger-scale environments. A supply-chain management company did this well, spending several years in stage 2, gaining experience, before moving ahead:

“We were fortunate and started small and grew slowly for quite a while. Once we felt like we were where we needed to be from an experience level, then we started accelerating, and that is why we were successful. If you jump in without a lot of knowledge, you’d better hire someone who knows what they are doing.” (Director of operations, supply-chain management company)



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· Incent the transition to virtual deployments. To make the transition, you will simply have to commit to doing so and, to a degree, push your organization over the line. This is most easily accomplished by incenting the transition through a change in your IT standards set by the leadership team. Your new standards should describe the types of physical and virtual systems that will be assigned to new workloads depending on their criticality, performance, and vendor support policies. If you have a chargeback mechanism, setting a much lower fee for provisioning and managing virtual servers will provide an additional economic incentive to go virtual.5 Successful firms have also established improved service-level agreements that promise better application availability and same-day server provisioning for virtual systems. You will have documented the benefits to the organization, so making the argument will be straightforward. But resistance to change is natural, so you will simply need to make it happen.

Getting To Stage 3: Focus On Better Process And Automation

If you are in stage 2 today, you will likely make the transition to stage 3 when you start to run out of easy virtualization targets. This stage typically starts out as a honeymoon phase, because it is the time in which organizations achieve a tremendous amount of satisfaction with their investments in server virtualization as they grow the virtual server pool, clear out the backlog for new application deployments, and find it so much easier to update, maintain, and advance their collection of virtual machine images. But unfettered growth of virtual systems and older processes can create new kinds of inefficiency:

“Server provisioning is so easy that you need to put in process controls for server sprawl — it is too easy to spin up a new environment. We are implementing a change management model under ITIL and implementing the same change management on distributed systems. We have metrics that we run once a month that show server counts, how many physical and virtual servers a department has. Then we can look at trends and dig in.” (Senior vice president, mid-size regional bank)

If you haven’t adapted your IT processes, you may have management issues, such as difficulty keeping track of your VM usage, knowing whether you are at the right patch level, or knowing if they are all in active use and who owns them. Furthermore, many firms entering stage 3 complain that they or their outsourcers have achieved hardware savings but that ongoing operational savings have eluded them. To get a handle on things, organizations increase their use of virtualization tools for life-cycle management, live migration, and patch tools that seek VMs out of compliance, and they start shifting from manual tasks to automating as much as possible. It’s the need to reduce management expenses and manage a large virtualized data center that drives organizations into stage 3. You can get ahead of the pain, though, by taking these proactive steps:

· Start adapting your processes for an all-virtual world. Increase operational savings and prevent VM sprawl by adjusting your administration and deployment processes early on. Every VM deployed should start with an approved VM template from a formal library maintained and



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updated centrally. Think of your running VMs as a cached copy of this desired state, and begin untangling IT processes that involve directly updating production machines. Plan your future workflows to perform maintenance on the stored library images instead of individual endpoints, since future system changes will be propagated from these central image repositories automatically.

· Invest in virtualization-aware management tools. As you scale up your virtual server environment, focus on building four key system management capabilities: 1) configuration management; 2) capacity planning and VM placement; 3) performance monitoring; and 4) real-time automation. Start with improving configuration management, which is necessary to orchestrate the relationship between large numbers of dynamically changing VMs, physical servers, storage, and network resources. As your virtualized pool grows in size, you will need tools that analyze capacity trends and optimize where your VMs run to minimize hardware footprint. Lastly, performance measurement and real-time automation will rise in importance as you increase the number of VMs per physical host and drive up overall utilization. To prevent problems from affecting user experience with multiple apps, your administrators need VM-aware performance monitoring tools that can help pinpoint issues as well as real-time automation that can adjust virtual or physical infrastructure to compensate for failures.

· Boot all VMs from networked storage. To facilitate easier administration and lower storage and server costs, ensure that all VMs are created and booted from the network. This is a necessity for live migration and makes HA easier and more predictable. Reduce server disk sizes and turn on deduplication technologies to keep the investment low.6 Many firms have found that the cost of Fibre Channel SANs is one of the biggest hardware costs in their virtualization farms; consider using Ethernet-attached storage instead to eliminate expensive SAN ports.7

· Set operational efficiency targets, and ramp up automated resource scheduling. Many companies are leaving savings on the table because they haven’t really given up on over-provisioning their servers. In stage 3, you should be using automated resource scheduling to run your physical servers closer to maximum utilization. Although your applications may differ, many companies find that they can run 30 VMs on a current generation server with four dual-core CPUs. Drive more efficient behavior by setting utilization targets and procedures that ensure your ability to meet them. If your utilization rates were an average of 5% to 10% and you raised them to an average of 20%, push this up to 60%. You can do this by pairing one or two consumptive business-critical applications with a collection of low consumption, noncritical workloads. Then use a policy-based automation engine, like VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), to allocate resources between applications based on priority or move noncritical apps to other servers if needed.

· Hire a virtual infrastructure architect. The VI architect’s main responsibility is to ensure that the virtual infrastructure runs smoothly, meets SLAs, and continues to expand in an organized manner.8 There are several other responsibilities that the VI architect must shoulder, such



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as training, forecasting, and coordinating. Having a VI architect on staff will help you get to stage 3, because this person helps set and enforce process changes and new policies that must be implemented. The VI architect should also be responsible for making sure that operational efficiency targets are met and will assist in the selection and implementation of virtualization-aware management tools.

Moving up To Stage 4: Think like A Cloud Service Provider

The key to moving to stage 4 is transforming your I&O department into a shared service provider. In this stage, your virtualized resources shift to become a pool that is managed at the pool level, and walls between workloads from different business units become fluid. In stage 3, most organizations clearly separate workloads from different business units either on their own physical systems or within separate virtual machine groups. In stage 4, groups start to share physical systems, and cost allocation or chargeback becomes necessary in order to account for the resources used. A vice president of technology infrastructure at a print and document management firm that is currently working toward the fourth stage of maturity stated, “We are trying to do a little more chargeback to drive awareness and change behavior. We are now realizing that we have been too accommodating to our customers.”

In this phase, application deployment becomes automated, as does pool optimization. Administrators start to take full advantage of automation tools for VM management and updating, the template library takes on paramount importance in process improvement, and every VM in your testing or development environment has an expiration date. Virtualization HA tools are now so trusted that they have become the standard for business-critical workloads and are even being applied to some mission-critical applications.

When your organization gets to the point where the health of the pools takes over for the health of the VMs inside it, your organization can achieve a higher level of efficiency and can more easily respond to changing business conditions, thus becoming less vulnerable to infrastructure failures. But getting to this phase isn’t easy. To make this transition, your organization must:

· Trust automation, and dramatically increase its use. Automation tools are critical to achieving stage 4, because in this phase you typically have hundreds if not thousands of VMs to manage, including a large template library. You have standardized on the tools you trust to keep this environment under control. Keep in mind, however, that virtual infrastructure management is a rapidly evolving market. Management will be a difficult hurdle, since all the management tools that you will need to progress to stage 4 are not yet available from mainstream providers like Microsoft or VMware.

· Train your developers to be self-sufficient. Application development professionals should be able to easily build new VMs from the template library, deploy in a predictable manner, and follow documented workflows for approvals and promotion through developer test, QA, and production deploy.



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· Put a cost allocation model in place. To turn your virtual server environment into a true shared services pool, you will need a simple means of accounting for its consumption. While most organizations we have interviewed are not ready for chargeback, they can accommodate cost allocation in their budget management processes. However, the move to a shared pool is more political than it is technological. If you can successfully share test resources, use this as a springboard for sharing of the production environment.

· Incorporate VM deployment into your IT service catalog. Organizations that successfully transition to stage 4 are able to clearly present a menu of VM deployment options to their users and control the degree of variation allowed. This is critical to being able to shift from managing VMs to managing the pool. Try to keep the number of options small and articulate the costs of these options in the catalog. Said the I&O manager at a US Air Force base: “For our virtual servers, we have three templates set up, a small, a medium, and a large. We just generate one of each; it has all the patches and the operating system already installed.” Requests that go off the menu should be at a premium and costed out at a full time and materials basis, since your administrators are more effectively utilized managing the pool than doing one-off deployments.

BuT AReN’T ClOuDS A FAST TRACk TO STAGe 4?

Public cloud computing platforms and hosted clouds provided by managed service providers are typically stage 4 environments. So your company can reap the benefits by outsourcing to these third parties. But your organization must be ready for their services, and Forrester data suggests most of you are not.9 It’s not the technology, it’s your organization’s lack of process maturity, comfort and experience with shared infrastructure, and cultural acceptance of this type of model that will hold you back. Thus, internal cloud solutions such as 3Tera AppLogic, Elastra, Zimory, and even forthcoming solutions from VMware and others, are unlikely to push you forward at an accelerated rate. Your organization must be ready for each stage of maturity, and this evolution takes time. If your administrators do not have the years of experience, if your processes and procedures need maturing and standardization, and if your business isn’t ready to embrace shared services, you will likely be unsuccessful in deploying an internal cloud.

Most of the larger IT consultancies have built virtualization practices designed to help move your organization forward. Some, such as Accenture, AT&T Consulting, HP, IBM, and VMware, have maturity assessment services that can help you identify areas for improvement, skills gaps, and training opportunities that can help you put an improvement plan in place.10



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r E c O M M E n D A t I O n S

PACe YOuRSelF: RuSHING FORWARD IS FRAuGHT WITH CHAlleNGeS

there’s a reason we chose to call these stages a maturity model. Each enterprise needs to prepare for the implications of widespread use of infrastructure virtualization; the changes it demands and the ease with which it can be used will vary based on the organization’s comfort with sharing, structure, process orientation, and standardization. Some organizations will struggle to get out of stage 2 due to insufficient controls and inconsistent processes. Some will find it difficult to embrace a shared services concept, while others will run into challenges like a business unit that refuses to embrace virtualization, a networking team that challenges the concept of moving VMs around, or unexpected downtime that sets back progress. to keep the experiences positive and maturity moving forward:

· Start with noncritical workloads for safe learning. As you experiment with new tools, processes and automations, try them out first on workloads that are not critical to the business. Forrester has interviewed several organizations that wanted a high profile win so that they could prove the technology was ready for widespread deployment, only to find that getting success with a complex, business-critical application takes twice as long and is far more costly and likely to fail. Development test labs are your safest places to try these new technologies. If you are in stage 2 and want to fast track to stage 3, start with a lab management tool like Surgient or VMware lab Manager.

· Beef up new server configurations. When refreshing servers, be aware that the most common bottlenecks with server virtualization are memory and I/O bandwidth — not cPu. Increasing the number and capacity of DIMMs used and the amount of nIcs in the servers will let you pack more VMs per physical box.

· Invest in I/O virtualization solutions. Although you are probably more likely to migrate VMs for maintenance purposes than for pool optimization, it helps if your infrastructure is migration-aware and will move the World Wide name (WWn), MAc address, VlAn and zone assignments, and other settings of the VMs when you need to migrate them. these technologies are common on blade systems but can be added to traditional environments as well using tools like Egenera PAn Manager and the cisco nexus v1000.



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W H A t I t M E A n S

MATuRITY GeTS YOuR ORGANIzATION ClOuD-ReADY

Forrester has written that cloud computing contains the seeds of the next generation of It infrastructure, and its basis is server virtualization. While all enterprise It shops certainly won’t transform into clouds in the near future, they will take on cloud properties to achieve greater utilization, flexibility, and operational efficiency. Automation is key to achieving this goal of organic It. but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. the future It infrastructure will have elements of dedicated physical deployments, hard-wired dedicated pools, shared pools, and links to public cloud services and platforms where appropriate. Maturing your virtualization practices makes this future consumable. Otherwise, it’s just too much of a stretch to achieve.

SuPPleMeNTAl MATeRIAl

Online Resource

The online version of Figure 4 is an interactive tool that helps clients assess their current stage of virtualization maturity.

Methodology

Over the past two years, Forrester infrastructure and operations analysts have conducted more than 200 interviews and inquiries with enterprise clients on the topic of server virtualization. Through those interviewed we documented a pattern of practices that formed the patterns of the maturity model depicted here.

eNDNOTeS1 Most companies are able to reduce server hardware spending, but many don’t realize an ongoing reduction

in management costs. Furthermore, not everyone sees the same level of savings on hardware. See the January 28, 2009, “Why Isn’t Server Virtualization Saving Us More?” report.

2 When a request for a new server comes through the workflow, it’s imperative that a virtual server always be considered first. Almost all of the organizations we spoke with had this policy, which prevents the procurement of unnecessary resources that will negate the cost-saving benefits of virtualization. Physical machines are only considered when an application cannot be virtualized for performance or vendor support reasons. A large US Air Force base encountered this problem when certain application owners refused to go virtual and were allowed to purchase physical servers, leading to inefficiencies and setting a precedent for future virtualization dissenters. See the March 20, 2009, “Best Practices: Aligning Your Infrastructure And Operations Department Around Virtualization” report.

3 Optimize your IT management processes for a virtual environment. Server provisioning and the server request workflow promise huge efficiency gains, but only if you re-architect the process around virtualization. If your server request workflow involves filling out and emailing a spreadsheet, you’re






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not taking advantage of the templates included in the virtualization software. Set up a self-service portal where end users can select a VM from a list of set templates, which is automatically provisioned or sent for approval to the next person in the workflow. This can reduce provisioning time from several days (or weeks) to a few hours, without even including procurement time. You will also need to rethink processes such as backups, software distribution, and virus scanning if you want to reap the full benefits of an efficient virtual environment. See the March 20, 2009, “Best Practices: Aligning Your Infrastructure And Operations Department Around Virtualization” report.

4 The main areas where time can be saved are in provisioning, patching, migrating, and auditing configuration. Provisioning alone at a large US Air Force base went from three-to-four weeks to 1.5 hours, and the server refresh cycle at Graybar went from 65 steps down to only six. See the March 20, 2009, “Best Practices: Aligning Your Infrastructure And Operations Department Around Virtualization” report.

5 Chargeback can be an extremely powerful tool for persuading application owners to migrate to virtual machines. The Indiana Office of Technology leverages this very successfully by charging a single price for a managed virtual server that is 10% less than its fee to manage a separately purchased physical machine. In other words, customers save 10% plus the cost of a physical server. If you don’t have a chargeback process already set up, consider memoback, where managers receive notifications on what they’re consuming, either in dollar amounts or in lists of resources. They’re not charged for their usage, but seeing usage trends can help influence behavior in a positive manner. See the March 20, 2009, “Best Practices: Aligning Your Infrastructure And Operations Department Around Virtualization” report.

6 In order to backup as much data as possible to disk and keep it there for as long as possible, companies must look for ways to reduce the acquisition cost of disk. One technology, deduplication, is key to making this happen. In some cases, IT professionals can reduce storage capacity by 95% using deduplication in their backup environment. See the July 10, 2009, “Use Deduplication To Store More With Less” report.

7 Although SANs have been built using the FC protocol for years, the benefits of a converged network using Ethernet as a transport mechanism are compelling. Getting started now with Ethernet-based SAN — even as FC over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI and even network files system protocol (NFS) fight it out for dominance in terms of protocol — is probably a good investment in the future of SAN architecture. Building familiarity and best practices, knocking down some of the political barriers, and aligning the organization to take advantage of a truly converged SAN and LAN network infrastructure makes good sense. See the February 7, 2008, “Cost Comparison Of iSCSI Versus Fibre Channel SAN Components” report.

8 The increasing use of virtualization demands greater collaboration between technology teams, which may be especially difficult if your I&O department is organized around traditional technology silos. Leading IT organizations are responding to the challenge by creating the role of the VI architect to manage and monitor the virtual environment, set and enforce policies, and educate peers and customers on virtualization. See the June 25, 2009, “Role Overview: Virtual Infrastructure Architect” report.

9 Forrester surveys of North American and European organizations show that only 5% to 7% of companies are using cloud computing platforms, despite interest in doing so from more than 25%. Source: Enterprise












16

And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2008; and Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2008.

10 Forrester evaluated the leading international consultancies across a variety of consolidation practice areas, one of which was x86 virtualization. See the June 13, 2008, “The Forrester Wave™: IT Consolidation Consultancies, Q2 2008” report.



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