The next leg of the journey is to port mission critical workloads to virtualized infrastructure.

Consolidation and automation of their IT infrastructures are what customers are seeking to make their Business processes and services more effective and virtualization has been a means to that. To take the process further, Virtualisation must extend to the domain of the mission crucial Business applications.

Historically, the challenges in moving Mission critical applications to virtual infrastructures have been about high availability, predictable performance and security primarily. There are however solutions available that help customers tide over these challenges by testing and validating infrastructure performance as well as troubleshoot issues that arise in the test phase.

While Virtualization deployments in the region are no longer confined to only the commodity workloads, the instances of virtualizing mission critical workloads are still in the early stages but are showing an increase. Most of the virtualisation deployments continues to be limited to servers and systems.

Feras Abu Aladous, Manager, Systems Engineering, Services & Support at Brocade says, “Many Enterprises in the region are targeting virtualization of up to 90% of their servers and systems, to increase Server’s utilization efficiency, increase mobility, orchestration agility. A reduced number of physical servers require reduced space and cooling inside the datacenter which leads to cost savings as well.”

Companies in the region are definitely starting to virtualise business critical applications at a rapid rate opines Gregg Petersen, Regional Director Middle East & SAARC at Veeam Software. He adds, “In some instances we are seeing banks deploying on a virtual workload, however the Middle East region is in the infancy stages of this compared to USA and Europe. But, there is definitely a huge move towards virtualisation of these core applications.”

Operational agility is a key reason driving Businesses to head into the next phase of virtualization. The next leg of the journey is to port the more difficult workloads to virtualized infrastructure.

“We believe most of the technical barriers to virtualization of these more difficult workloads have already been resolved, and it is already becoming mainstream to virtualize across the board.  We are seeing different factors driving the virtualization of these database and “big iron” workloads though.  In the first phase of virtualization customers were focused on consolidation of “easy workloads.” For this next phase, they are much more focused on operational agility and speed of time-to-market.  So IT departments that virtualize all of their workloads tend to do so because they want to offer a cloud utility experience to their lines of business – this is no longer just about asset cost avoidance,” says Aaron White General Manager, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, Hitachi Data Systems.

Over the past few years, other hypervisors have gained ground while VMware’s Hyper V still dominates by far in terms of x86 server virtualization infrastructure with Microsoft a distance second. Hyper-V has constantly improved and added more features to compete with VMware and gain market share while there are other competitors including Citrix’s XenServer that carries no licensing charge, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) etc that have smaller market share.

The focus has however shifted away from hypervisors to innovations around the Management layers above the hypervisor.

Aaron says, “We have started to see them, but this tends to be within System Integrators and Service Providers’ landscape rather than in the traditional internal enterprise IT.  The reason for this is a “leveling-up” of the capabilities of the hypervisor. So whereas in the past there was clear white space between ESX, the leading hypervisor, and Hyper-V / OpenStack, we have now seen that the hypervisor layer is becoming commoditized over time. And customers are starting to focus more on the management layers above it. We tend to see customers introducing at a “second hypervisor,” because they are looking at leveraging the merits of a specific management ecosystem, rather than because the specific hypervisor brings differentiation.

Enterprises mostly stick with one virtualization vendor to reduce cost of operational expenses but that is beginning to change. Customers are looking for best functionalities as some workloads do perform better on some hypervisors vis-à-vis others.

Greg says, “We are witnessing many cases where customers order Veeam Software – both hyper-V and VMware in large quantities. This tells us that customers are utilising the best of both worlds. Generally, we see a lot of production environments on VMware and hyper-V and this is where Veeam plays a crucial role because we have the ability to provide the best of both worlds. In addition we have also seen a large amount of deployment in business critical applications with hyper-V and VMware, once again proving that multi-hypervisor environments are becoming more common.”

Multi-hypervisor environments bring along its own set of challenges and therefore there could be customers sticking with one hypervisor. However, cross platform management will be a reality that needs to be taken in stride for those who are willing to look at the best of the options.

Aaron argues, “The downside of that is that managing two hypervisors increases your operational overhead – you need to have two sets of operational and integration processes.  This is why it mainly occurs within the System Integrator space – they have the organizational economies of scale that can make it cost effective.  We have also seen this drive an interest in converged platforms such as Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform.  This platform takes care of all the workflow required to integrate and manage everything from the hardware elements up to the hypervisor.  As it supports both VMware and Hyper-V, it frees customers up to focus on business workflow “above the hypervisor” and is a key enabler for this new trend in Infrastructure as a Service.”

The datacenter

In the datacenter Server virtualization has seen widespread adoption and continues to be the primary focus of virtualization efforts. With the increasing adoption of virtualized computing infrastructure, enterprises are able to run multiple servers on the same equipment, reducing the demand for additional servers. As a result, data centers are becoming smarter and supporting more users than ever before while requiring less hardware to do all of this.

Feras says, “Virtualization is the major trend inside the data centers; and it’s expected that by the end of 2014 around 70% of Server workload will be virtualized, but Storage and Network virtualization is still very low.”

Virtualization in other domains is still growing at a modest pace and would be the focus in the second phase. Virtualized infrastructure offers the potential for higher productivity, scalability and manageability compared to traditional computing which is what customers are in pursuit of as they allow virtualization to get deeper into their networks.

Aaron says, “We would consider server virtualization to be pretty well advanced – we’re about 90% there, and are just about tying up loose ends with it. People are now looking to technical innovations in network and storage virtualization, as well as the management ecosystem to provide the next level of agility and efficiency.”

Automation would be a key objective going forward in the datacenter. An effective virtualization strategy lays down the framework for more automation of regular tasks and this enables greater efficiency with available computing resources.

Greg says, “There is a lot of buzz around automation in the datacentre at the moment. Over the last three years virtualisation has moved from 30 – 40% to 60 – 70%. Most of our customers are about 60% virtualised. As organisations become mature in virtualisation, automation will continue to become an important aspect for companies.”

There are bottlenecks along the way for a wider adoption of virtualization. For instance, there are some very mature technology offerings in the Storage Virtualization space but significant differences between individual vendor strategies are slowing down adoption, believes Aaron.

He comments, “Most vendors still sell separate storage virtualization appliances, whereas Hitachi has integrated storage virtualization capabilities into every enterprise storage array that we have sold for the last ten years.  And our customers have now leveraged this during several transition events to virtualize legacy assets and accelerate transformation.  So we believe pretty strongly that Storage Virtualization just needs to be an integrated feature of every storage controller in order to gain broader adoption.”

He also believe that applications are still too tightly coupled to physical storage assets and physical locations.

Aaron adds, “This is the next wave of value-add from Storage Virtualization, and it is why we have invested in Storage Virtualization OS, which will enable us to run a common storage virtualization platform across all of our storage hardware containers.  We also believe that customers will move to active/active architectures and have introduced distributed Virtual Storage Machines which can live forever, delivering zero downtime during site disaster recovery and non-disruptive technology refresh.”

On the other hand SDN (software defined networking) has still had very limited adoption and there are a lot of competing standards at the transport virtualization and management control layers.  There are also strong requirements for a more integrated approach between the management frameworks for SDN and Network Function Virtualization.

“We believe that the benefits in terms of total cost to provision new services are so substantial that we will see very active investment for these use cases in the short term within the SI and Service Provider space.  Once this technology is proven in this arena it will become more common in tradition enterprise IT.

SMB adoption

Virtualistion technologies suit growing SMB Businesses as well as the already large sized customers. In fact Virtualisation helps dynamically scale up capabilities of a Business’s IT infrastructure and this is a trend seen in the case of companies who are looking to add more virtual servers.

Greg says, “SMB clients are definitely adopting virtualisation and we can see this with our customers. We are seeing companies who have up to 10 servers and instead of putting it on physical servers they are recognising the need to virtualise. It’s a trend that is rapidly increasing and more and more customers are realising the value in adopting virtualisation.”

There is better understanding among SMB Businesses that Virtualisation will help them not only manage costs of upgrading IT infrastructure but also improve critical tasks like data backups and high availability.

Feras says, “SMB market is considering virtualization more than ever. SMBs are trying to get more performance and flexibility out of their existing server resources, considering the rising cost of managing physical data centers. Server virtualization improves disaster recovery and high availability allowing administrators to take VM snapshots, and recover from existing snapshots, and reduces the number of required servers to implement solutions.

However, SMBs have limited exposure to Virtualistion benefits within their networks and largely confined to only server consolidation. Enterprises on the other hand are more focused on optimizing the benefits across and therefore adopt innovations faster.

Aaron says, “We’ve seen large enterprises that are much more virtualized than SMBs. In fact, the most virtual organizations are the ones who are process-driven, focused, and committed to achieving efficiencies as a primary goal. Those who lag behind in the virtualization landscape the most are those who have taken some individual areas of the business, and run the IT departments for those sectors almost as pet projects.  In addition, the SMB space tends to focus on Server Virtualization whereas SI’s and large enterprises have clear additional use cases that they can enable by deploying network and storage virtualization layers as well.”

Server virtualization will be the key driver of virtualisation market but for customers who have already gone through a first phase of virtualization, they will have the opportunity to look at tapping into other innovations from the virtualisation industry.

Aaron says, “Servers and to a certain extent storage virtualization too have seen growth. For networking it’s a bit of a different story – they’re not necessarily about consolidation they’re about programmability. Networking efficiency comes from bringing complex systems into a virtual, manageable space, and alleviating IT departments dependency on hardware segmentation and re-config.”

With virtualization, the utilization rates of the installed hardware has a huge jump. The ROI benefits are seen in a short time.

Greg says, “With server virtualisation the benefits are seen instantly. Storage and network virtualisation are yet to gain traction in this region compared to other regions. But, it’s just a matter of time before network and storage virtualisation takes off, because it’s cost effective and far more efficient.”

While most virtualized workloads are either server or desktop workloads, there is an increased interest in virtualizing network and application delivery etc.

Feras says, “Sever virtualization is the major trend in Data center virtualization and very mature, on the other hand network and storage virtualization is still under evaluation by enterprises, and not widely implemented.”

In summary, there are applications that are still ring-fenced from virtualization and while that percentage may begin to come down each year, even outside of that the scope for virtualization remains high. So while there is a huge variance among customers, the number of those that have virtualized the entire stack – server, storage and network is increasing rapidly. Further, while virtualization may not be seen as essential before adopting cloud computing, cloud deployments in virtual environments deliver optimized results and hence a key consideration factor for Businesses looking to adopt cloud services.