Tweet

5 Virtualization Strategies for the Budget Challenged and Reasons to Start NOW!

Written by: Marc Potter

Article Overview: Virtualization is a technology finally hitting its stride, but there are still some companies that don't know how or why they should use Virtualization. Some challenges with virtualization are reviewed as well as 5 strategies that can be used to help make it affordable even with tightening budgets.

5 Virtualization Strategies for the Budget Challenged and Reasons to Start NOW!

Every so often a technology gains enough inertia and acceptance it changes the game for everyone. When this happens, there is a certain buzz in the air for guys like me. It’s because we know that the top players will be burning the midnight oil wrenching on new great features and products to fill the space. The pricing gets more competitive, and the industry opens up to a whole bunch of “trailer hitch” companies that bring some much needed value to the table. Companies like Platespin (recently purchased by Novell, Marathon Technologies, Vizioncore, and others all have great offerings that extend the virtualization story. Yes, Virtualization is that game changer that has geeks giving up star trek at 2 in the morning.

With the great buzz around the technology, why are some companies not on the “V train”? Great question and one I keep asking them. In some cases, it is education or lack of good information, in other cases, it is budget related. When departments are all fighting over the same “budget bone”, how do you get your decision makers to Act? Give them some great virtualization strategies that will show them how to pay for it.

A little background I’ve heard some talk that this technology is too new to trust mission critical applications with. Truth is, the premise has been around for over 40 years and first used in mainframes in the 60’s. Virtualization as we know it on the x 86 platforms was championed by VMware in the 90’s. Today, enterprise virtualization has very little overhead, and virtual servers run with little to no performance impact. The reasons for using virtualization are well documented. It can reduce CAPEX (capital expenditure) by eliminating the need for physical servers by 10:1 or more. The byproduct is a large reduction in electric, cooling, and physical footprint that can reduce OPEX (operations expenditures) by reducing downtime, and increasing productivity. Additionally, Virtualization can help reduce risk, and increase uptime with live migration, workload balancing and other features that can increase application performance and ultimately end user experience.

If I can help just one starving company by introducing low to no cost virtualization strategies, then my job is done! Not really, but I always want to say that. In reality, there are no good excuses for not at least putting together a virtualization strategy. The following are 5 virtualization strategies for the budget challenged company.

Strategy # 1: The Starter Strategy. If your company would like to get started with virtualization, but you think you cannot afford “enterprise class” virtualization, you can! Thank the highly competitive market for virtualization hypervisors for that. Know that there are some “trade offs” to consider when choosing your free hypervisor. VMware ESXi a great choice for shops that plan on using VMware management tools in the future. Citrix XenServer 5.5 is a very complete offering that includes centralized multi server management, and live motion among the features. Microsoft shops using Hyper V can use the free Citrix Essentials for Hyper V Express edition, which adds some needed enterprise functionality. Novell Suse Linux Enterprise and Open Enterprise Server have built in virtualization based on the XEN hypervisor with some Novell mods optimized for MS Server, Linux and NetWare guest OS’s. (Note the Interop agreement between Novell and Microsoft ensures high performance between Microsoft and Linux). Don’t be too gun shy when choosing a free hypervisor, you can easily change hypervisor platforms using V2V tools to migrate virtual to virtual platforms. Platespin is arguably the best, but VMware, Citrix and other 3^rd parties tools exist, at no cost.

Strategy # 2: The Heterogeneous Hybrid Strategy Early adopters of virtualization in many cases are using VMware as their vendor of choice. They are the 800 pound gorilla that owns the market share, and the premium licensing costs that go with it. In all fairness, they deserve the position, but in some cases, there is an argument for a heterogeneous strategy. The hypervisor has pretty much been commoditized. The battle for supremacy really boils down to virtual machine management. If you study a comparison guide of virtualization platforms side by side, you will find that VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Iron (now Oracle), Novell, SUN all can consolidate servers, isolate workloads, and can be managed in some way between physical hardware. Did you just buy the top of the line platform for a 30:1 consolidation when you only have 10 workloads? What did you pay for that? Do you have a mission critical workload that you really want VMware ESX server, but you can’t afford to do it this year? Move some non critical workloads to a free hypervisor, like VMware ESXi so you can still use the VMware management tools. Do you have a Citrix XenApp server farm? Move those to Citrix XenServer 5.5 which happens to be optimized for Citrix XenApp Servers.

Let me give little warning here. Companies who are planning a whole hearted leap into VMware vSphere should know that this is a very complete, integrated strategy that has some state of the art technology, and is NOT very friendly to the heterogeneous strategy. It can be done in doses, but know you may be losing some vSphere functionality. This is a trade off that must be decided by each company. vSphere is not a budget challenged discussion, it is a performance and optimization discussion.

Strategy # 3: The Extending your End of Life Systems Strategy How many times do you hear the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Well this strategy takes that to heart. Do you have an old proprietary program that does everything you want, because you built it in house, you love, it works it runs your multi-million dollar manufacturing environment…. But it is on a dying platform on dying hardware? This scenario brings a tear of joy to the eye of the sales person who gets to convert you over, but this strategy can help keep ‘ole data base betsy working hard for a little while longer and putting the conversion timeline in your control.

The main goal is to at least get you working on up to date hardware that isn’t ready to blow up at any moment. Before virtualization, your hardware would dictate which operating system you would need to be on, and by default, which data base would be supported, on down the line to “obsoletsville”. You’ll probably find allot of these systems were built in the 90’s to run on NetWare, a very bulletproof platform that just works. (VMware ESX server, and Novell OES 2 server both can support NetWare guest OS’s, check each companies compatibility list for specifics.) A point of note, Novell is still a very strong company with some very good products. This claim is strongly supported by the Microsoft / Novell interop. (See the moreinteropwebsite) so don’t be talked into a premature rip and replace when a little strategy will go a long way.

Strategy #4: The Poor Man’s Disaster Recovery Disaster Recovery (DR) is a very big subject. The simplest being, backups, the most complex including physical recovery of assets, people, over geographies, blah blah… too much to cover here, BUT what virtualization CAN do on a shoestring budget is simple replication of workloads to a safe place.

A workload is the VM, OS, and Application. Consider this strategy mission critical if you don’t have DR in place. It gives you the minimum protection that really can’t be done with simple tape backups. Simple replication of VM’s using live migrations tools will also get you prepped for stepping up to better solutions like Platespin Protect or the Forge hardware appliance, or VMware’s Site Recovery Manager or Marathon’s everRUN which automate the DR process and provides better protection and availability. Before virtualization, DR was a 6 figure and up buy in with some enterprises spending millions of dollars. Today, it can start for free, and scale up to budget worthy. The best free option here is Citrix XenServer 5.5 since it comes with live motion and multi server management, and later when paired with Marathon eveRUN (a strategic Citrix partner), you have a top shelf solution that is a steal compared to the alternatives.

Strategy #5: The Storage Virtualization Strategy I know this one may be considered a little out of scope of the virtualization conversation, but storage virtualization is being leveraged by many major vendors to provide some real measurable cost savings. Multimedia applications are quickly becoming part of the normal enterprise workplace, and videos, pictures, and .mp3 content is eating up disk space on email and web servers.

Like server virtualization, storage virtualization represents physical storage devices as software, enabling them to do all kinds of wonderful things like central pooling of resources, thin provisioning, replication and more. Storage companies that are leading the field today such as Compellent, Equallogic, SUN, HP’s Lefthand SAN all use storage virtualization in their products in some way to achieve their functionality. Many SAN solutions are not intelligent, but JBOD (not my definition) is just a bunch of disks. It should be “Just a Bad Optimization iDea”. They end up costing a lot of CAPEX, and OPEX dollars.

How does this help my budget you might ask? Well first, the cost of intelligent storage has come down recently. You can now start with a smaller iSCSi SAN at a lower starting point, add central storage management and thin provisioning very inexpensively. Software based companies like DataCore, StarWind offer software SAN solutions that can be built on your own hardware and JBOD disk arrays for a song.

Wrap it all up with a bow

Virtualization should be something affordable to all companies. Let me go out on a limb here and make a statement. Except for very specific instances, all servers should be virtualized. Some companies today are starting to adopt single instance virtualization to take advantage of the administration and management benefits. Small companies that would like to add a new application, but not the cost of a new server can now do that, and even mix the Operating Systems. Imagine the newly found freedom to now add a open source Linux program to your once “under utilized” windows server.

With strategies that are as budget friendly as FREE, there are no more excuses. Virtualization new comers… Find a non mission critical workload and virtualize it with a free solution. Build a template and see how fast server provisioning can be. Use P2V tools to see how easy it can be to move a physical machine to a virtual one. Then put a good virtualization plan together, educate yourself, find help where needed, and reap the rewards… within your budget.

Related Articles
  Virtualization: A Small Business Perspective
  Effective low budget internet marketing strategies
  Recognizing the Power of Belief
  Healthcare Marketing in a Down Economy
  Top 7 No’s that Derail the Sales Process

Article Tags: burning the midnight oil, buzz, critical applications, decision makers, geeks, inertia, mainframes, marathon technologies, midnight oil, novell, offerings, premise, span style, star trek, table span, technology gains, trailer hitch, v train, vizioncore, vmware



Related Forum Posts
Re: 10 Reasons Who Startups Fail & Book Recommendations - Great post,but please edit the headline. I presume it is "10 Reasons Why Startups Fail & Book Recommendation
Re: FREE Toronto Referral Workshop - Kevin, I'll try to get a copy of the slides and summarize the 14 Strategies. Stay tuned!
Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: Should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals - According to Guy Kawasaki, he says "you should only hire and keep people that you'd hustle over to and engage in a conversation...Life is too short to work with people you don't naturally like-especially in a young, small organization" ("The Art of the Start" pg 112). I think the reverse is also true and I wouldn't want to work for anyone I didn't like or want to talk to if I saw him/her outside of the office. In addition, Kawasaki also says "Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players...This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies. If there is one thing a CEO must do, it's hire a management team that is better than he is" ("The Art of the Start" pg 101). Kawasaki's quote is definitely in favor of hiring the ambitious worker, but do most CEO's even have the humility to admit that someone is better than them?
Re: How can I promote my site? - To promote website online you need to hire professional SEO expert because you have to perform the below activities for your website promotion:- Start On page optimization which includes the following task:- 1. Meta tag optimization 2. Header Tag Optimization 3. Alt tag Optimization 4. Content Optimization 5. Anchor Text Optimization 6. URL Optimization 7. Navigation Optimization After On page optimization, Start off Page Optimization which includes the following task:- 1. Link building 2. Directory submission 3. Classified Ads submission 4. Article submission 5. Press Release submission 6. Social Bookmarking 7. Business Listing 8. Local Listing 9. Blog Optimization 10. PPT Creation & Optimization


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Top Ten Home-Based Businesses

A Guide to Franchise Financing

A New Year in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.