A trend that has plenty of momentum
Back in October 2009, VOIP vendors jumped on the virtualization bandwagon by introducing virtualized versions of their products.
They are joining a trend that has plenty of momentum: Enterprise data centers are moving to virtualization with great gusto. Over ninety-percent of organizations are already virtualizing servers with 42% of workloads virtualized. The reason organizations adopt virtualization is to increase agility and flexibility of the data center. The primary agility gain is stronger/faster business continuity/disaster recovery; virtualization provides a five-fold increase in disaster recovery. The low hanging fruit applications—print servers, email, DNS servers, file servers—were the first to go virtual. And as noted, we’re now seeing applications like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and unified communications (UC) moving to virtualization.
With a virtualized UC solution, the software that normally runs on a dedicated hardware box now runs on top of a hypervisor opening the door to having other servers running on the same box. This architecture conveys the same advantages to UC virtualization as to virtualization in general, including scalability, agility, and reliability. For example, a virtual UC solution can be running in one data center and within minutes be running in the backup data center. The alternative is to have two UC servers in a backup configuration: One at the main data center and one at the backup data center.
Performance of VOIP is a big concern with virtualization. With virtualization multiple virtual machines, share storage, network and CPU resources. For realtime applications such as UC this raises the issue of consistent and predictable performance. Vendors are taking different approaches to dealing with this problem, including restricting servers to customized hypervisors. Another approach that can be taken regardless of vendor is to adopt a one-to-one ratio between virtual UC server and physical server—thus ensuring there’s no resource contention. This approach limits scalability, but delivers the other advantages.
If performance issues are overcome there is a significant flexibility gain for branch operations and for call centers. A company can configure UC servers, email and other services all on one box; saving hardware, power maintenance, and support costs at the branch. Similarly, in the call center the UC server and call center software can be co-resident on the same hardware platform. Combine these benefits with the BC/DR agility benefits and you get a more resilient branch and call center.
