Virtualization brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. Data center virtualization encompasses a range of virtualization activities aimed at creating a virtualized computing environment, such as for use in cloud computing, within a data center. Here are some tips to ensure a successful data center virtualization.
Leverage your existing investment
Most enterprises think that the implementation of a virtualization infrastructure will be expensive or very difficult to achieve. A virtualization platform can be simple to put into place. Find out the servers you already have to actually centralize and virtualize in your Data Center, so that server virtualization can be increased.
Consider the cost
Analyze the current and future costs. The biggest cost in many data centers is the power to actually run the data center. By means of virtualization technologies, it is possible to cut your Data Center operating costs reducing the number of servers in operation. You can enable power management features, replace old disk and tape technologies with new equipment that increases capacity and saves power.
Ascertain what can to be virtualized
Although many packaged applications support Virtualization, there are few that don’t. Carefully examine which of your software and hardware platforms are supported and which might require upgrading before rolling out Virtualization.
Plan and prepare for growth
Take care to ensure your Virtualization solution accommodates your long-term capacity and performance needs, as there is always the possibility of your requirements growing over time. Performance requirements are bound to increase along with the increase in capacity. The solution you choose must scale non-disruptively so as not to cause downtime and user disruption and also keep management costs down.
Analyze management plans and instruct staff.
It is important to determine whether your staff has the skills to support Virtualization. Ensure that your consolidation solution accommodates increasing complexity without requiring a larger staff to manage it.
Tackle Security
IT pros must secure virtual machines as they do physical machines and take extra steps to ensure the virtual environment is locked down. "Technology and disciplines for discovery, configuration, change management and more become critical to detecting virtual malware.
A good storage plan is vital
A good virtualization plan is tied to a god storage plan. Backup is highly essential. Virtualization is growing is because it can provide business continuity capabilities. Any Virtualization solution should provide a flexible architecture and the tools needed to help you manage capacity and include load balancing to ensure performance and fast response times and redundancy.
The major benefit in datacenter virtualization is that it has almost direct impact is on the expenses and on wasted processing power and leans towards creating a green datacenter. With datacenter virtualization there is no need for additional physical consolidation and replicated storage of source data. It becomes quicker to build and lower the cost to operate when compared to data-warehouse-only system integration approaches.
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