Getting your virtualised servers set up and running right really is just the start of any IT leader’s virtualisation work. And that if you don’t think holistically about virtualisation, you’re in for a rude surprise, says Jafa. “Lots of folks are going to find out that virtualisation poses a whole new set of concerns for security, networks and applications.”
In fact, he calls management a “make or break issue” for virtualisation. “Monitoring and management becomes absolutely critical in the virtual environment,” says Jafa, who started work about three years ago on a large project to consolidate First American’s data centres and standardise its storage and networking technologies.
To that end, his organisation is directing much of its energy now at management processes and tools, wide application of ITIL process to the virtualised environment, and even reshaping the IT staff.
Jafa hopes that in the future virtualisation will play into better management of his networking technologies as well. He’s already testing some new technologies from vendors including Cisco to advance that goal. If you’re trying to do holistic virtualisation planning, Jafa’s advice may prove particularly interesting.
First American’s business delivers information such as mortgage, real estate and financial data to clients in those industries and others. So while many IT leaders closely monitor virtualisation projects to ensure that application service levels don’t slow down for internal users, Jafa’s team also keenly focuses on application performance for external customers.
The highest efficiency
Jafa says he defines virtualisation as “achieving the highest efficiency of any given system at any give time”. In servers, virtualisation is netting him 50 to 60 per cent utilisation rates, compared to 10 to 15 per cent utilisation rates on standard servers, he says. The team also sees a 30 to 35 per cent reduction in energy consumption per virtual machine compared to its physical counterpart, Jafa notes.
“Any server that IT’s using is going virtual,” Jafa says, which means some 300 servers will be consolidated onto seven or eight physical machines. “We continue to work on virtualising disaster recovery.” Jafa is bringing disaster recovery in house: “That’s going to be completely virtualised”, he says, noting he hopes to complete the DR project by end of year.
Centralising services
Virtualisation has also helped Jafa’s team as the company consolidates and centralises IT services for an array of business units. “The process of bringing them on and migrating them has become faster,” Jafa says, noting that the company’s IT provisioning has improved by a factor of 65 per cent, changing from weeks to days.
On the disaster recovery and high availability front, virtualisation has given Jafa equally dramatic results. For every 100 servers, he now puts aside four servers for failover purposes and six to eight servers for workload help at peak usage time for the company’s customers. Previously, the company needed to put aside 200 servers for the same purpose.
Process Lessons
Server virtualisation is the start of the changes at First American, not the end. “As we started to think about virtualisation, we started to think about standardisation,” says Jafa, as in standardising processes and utilising shared resources, across not only servers but also storage and networking technology.
“Capacity planning has become critical in the virtual world,” Jafa says. “That’s one we’re still maturing and figuring out. We’re using some of the HP [SiteScope] tools for capacity planning.”
“Virtualisation will start posing a serious challenge organisationally to IT,” he says. “The current vertical disciplines that we have will not be appropriate.” For example, he says, IT may need a horizontal group with members from various teams to handle provisioning.
How is his group dealing with this situation? “So far we haven’t torn down the vertical organisations,” Jafa says. “Through the architecture organisation, we have brought those teams together.” His IT team now has an overall architecture team that works on design, architecture and process questions.
Process, he believes, is key. Jafa, who was already a big fan of using ITIL to standardise IT process before he started the virtualisation efforts, weaves ITL into his team’s efforts in the physical and virtual worlds. Jafa says close to 55 per cent of his team is ITIL-certified and he has a fulltime ITIL instructor in house.
“In the virtual world, processes become critical,” Jafa says. “We want to test our processes to see how they will do. For example, provisioning has to be constantly defined.”
“We just did a whole assessment of exactly what will the impact of virtualisation be on our processes,” he says. “We have to meld some of our processes for the virtual world,” he says, noting network design and even software design has to change in the virtualised environment. “Now we can look at the long term impact.”
Virtual switching
On that networking front, Jafa is now working with Cisco to test out technologies such as Virtual Switching Systems (VSS) and VFrame (a family of provisioning and automation tools), in a quest to make his network more standardised and simpler to manage.
“Network provisioning becomes as critical as server provisioning,” Jafa says. “We are very interested in virtualisation of the LAN, so we don’t have all these protocols for storage and fibre in the network. The simpler and more collapsed the protocols are, the easier the virtualised world will be managed.”
