How to create a business-boosting virtualization plan

As an IT executive at Wachovia, Tony Bishop earned kudos among his peers and the industry for his sophisticated views on virtualization. He oversaw the development of a services-oriented, virtualized next-generation IT infrastructure that allowed the company to reap huge savings while ushering in drastic improvements in application performance, processing times and overall efficiencies.Today, Bishop is CEO of Adaptivity, a start-up IT consultancy. Here he shares his thoughts about what makes a great virtualization strategy, the best tools for use with a virtual infrastructure, and what the future holds in store.

Most enterprises -- 70% by some industry estimates -- either have completed or are engaged in a server virtualization project. While this means people are embracing a logical view of IT -- which is a good thing -- you suggest there's a lot of room for improvement. Explain.

The bad of it is this: People have approached virtualization as a bottom-up, not a top-down, strategy. They're looking at their servers, utilization rates and maybe trends, and they're basically saying, 'I'm going to split these servers up and partition them to get more efficiency.' [This view doesn't take into account that] applications and the information are the consumers of servers. If IT focuses only on the utilization efficiency and doesn't incorporate a top-down assessment of what resources applications and information are consuming, then it's not going to be able to drive the broadest impact for the business through virtualization. That's No. 1. No. 2, [a narrow approach] will cause performance issues that will either negate the value or slow down the adoption of virtualization.

We had seen this at Wachovia, and I've heard it from my peers. Think about it this way. For servers, we used to rely on symmetrical multiprocessing, or SMP, where your Sun and IBM boxes -- the Unix servers -- created logical partitions. They shared memory, processors, I/O and disk. As soon as we did that, we started seeing applications where performance and processes were constrained because of the partitioning. This led people to dedicate SMP boxes to single applications so the applications wouldn't be constrained. And then we moved to clusters, and then dedicated clusters to those applications. Why? We needed to be able to handle peak periods of performance and processing. The bottom-up approach didn't align to the demand side, and that's the same problem we see with virtualization and why a lot of virtualization strategies are failing.

Link to our podcast series: More voices of virtualization 

So, in a sense, x86 server virtualization's simplicity is its curse as well?

Yes, partly. People do love to adopt technology that is easy to implement, works relatively well and has some good concepts to it. But this breaks down at organizations that are not looking at end-to-end service delivery and using that to drive how they build, design, implement and transform.

How does one go about changing a virtualization strategy from a bottom-up to a top-down approach?

Three things must occur. First, you need to virtualize at the demand layer. You have to understand what the user is asking for, what the application needs, where the destination is and where to do the processing, based on what's being asked.

Then you need to virtualize all types of supply-the network, storage, compute, memory and I/O. You need a strategy for ensuring that every single component is virtualized. You can't have your virtual servers over here, but leave everything else physical.

The third step is to incorporate life-cycle management of the virtualization platform, which to me means the virtualized demand and virtualized supply combined and the service life-cycle. I need to sustain the life of that business with this virtualized demand matched with the virtual resources; and understand how they're matched, managed and provisioned.

If I look at the user experience and my processes, can I ask, 'Where am I not meeting the needs of the business, in terms of performance, cost or efficiency?' If you think of those three factors, and then decompose your most critical business processes and look at where you're not meeting those business needs, you can prioritize your road map.

Then, from the bottom up, you want to understand what you have. That's where you use a tool like Tideway Systems' [Foundation, which] tells you the physical inventory and the dependencies of your existing infrastructure. You're able to understand how every system interconnects, down from the network and up to the application. That's powerful, especially because then, when you virtualize and add changes, it can show you the new dependencies. Now, when you come bottom-up, with 'what do I have' and 'where can I target opportunities to virtualize,' you can understand what that would do to the infrastructure. Then, if you use a tool like OpTier's [CoreFirst], which shows you user transactions as they evolve through the platform -- not a simulation, that user-experience view, correlated with what's actually happening or with what I have, allows me to say, now, if I virtualize both the demand and the supply, now look at what I can optimize.

So, you map top-down -- where am I not meeting the needs of the business? Then map bottom-up -- what do I physically have and how's it all working? Then apply real-time user experience and, then, guess what you have the ability to do? You have the ability to optimize on a broad basis incrementally and quickly.

How do you convince IT to move from the tactical approach to virtualization?

It can be tough. But what is IT in business to do? It's in business to deliver and constantly improve service. IT executives who are committed to doing more with less and doing more better, can in a very simple, three-step process, using commonsense dialog and best-in-class tooling, start to radically drive useful virtualization strategies and create the virtual data center.

And the other pieces, like the network and storage -- how do they fit in?

Network, server, storage, disk, application components, data components -- these all make up a service unit. [An enterprise application-virtualization platform like DataSynapse's] FabricServer understands what that service unit is and what's being asked of the demand side, and matches it.