Boost Your Virtualisation ROI

It has long been understood that virtualization can offer significant business benefits to most organisations, but for these benefits to be fully realised it is necessary to have an effective way of managing the virtual infrastructure.

Organisations of all sizes can boost the return on investment (ROI) in their virtual server infrastructure with the launch of Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM 2008 R2).

VMM 2008 R2, part of the System Center family of management products, exploits the new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor platform to increase operational agility, enhance productivity, and enable more efficient use of IT resources.

Increase Agility, Reduce Downtime with Live Migration and Maintenance Mode
One of the key new benefits of VMM 2008 R2 is its support for Live Migration, a feature that provides higher server availability and significantly reduces planned downtime. It does this by enabling administrators to select a running virtual machine from VMM 2008 R2's management console and move it to a new host whilst it is running, without any interruption to service and complete transparency to any users connected to the virtual machine.

This means administrators can easily move virtual machines off a particular physical host so that it can be brought down for planned maintenance, or if it shows signs of imminent failure. To do this as efficiently as possible, administrators can use VMM 2008 R2 to place a server into maintenance mode. Once in this mode, VMM 2008 R2 automatically uses Live Migration to move all virtual machines running on the server to the most suitable alternative hosts automatically so the maintenance operation can start as soon as possible. Alternatively, maintenance mode can be configured to put the virtual machines running on a host into a saved state for the duration of the maintenance, after which they can be reactivated and put back to work.

Higher Data Centre Productivity Through Automation
Two other new features in VMM 2008 R2 increase productivity by minimising the amount of administrators' time required to carry out Live Migrations. The first, host compatibility checking, automates the task of ensuring that the destination host in a Live Migration operation is compatible with the source host so that the migration will be successful. The second, Live Migration queuing, queues pending Live Migration operations to avoid two or more occurring simultaneously and interfering with each other, which could result in unsuccessful migrations.

More Efficient Use of Server Resources
VMM 2008 R2's performance resource optimisation feature enables the management software to use Live Migration to allocate virtual machines to the most appropriate physical hosts available in a server room or data centre automatically. As server loads change over time, VMM 2008 R2 reconfigures the virtual infrastructure dynamically by moving virtual machines between physical hosts to ensure optimum resource usage and performance.

Reduced Storage, Power and Cooling Costs
The ability to optimise and consolidate the placement of virtual machine files on one or more SANs can help minimise storage costs and power requirements while increasing virtual machine performance. A new feature of VMM 2008 R2 called Quick Storage Migration (QSM) enables administrators to move virtual machine files from one storage location to another, or even one SAN to another, while the virtual machine continues to run as normal for most of the operation. The virtual machine only needs to be suspended in a saved state for a brief interval – usually no more than two minutes – while the memory state and associated differencing disks are migrated to the new storage location. When VMM 2008 R2 is used to manage VMware virtual machines, administrators can move running virtual machines' files to new storage locations without any downtime at all, using VMware's Storage vMotion.

Increased Storage Efficiency
A new technology called Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 also enables storage to be used much more efficiently, cutting costs, and reducing storage requirements further. Put simply, CSV technology allows all the nodes in a cluster to access shared storage at any time, where previously this was not possible. Thanks to CSV, administrators can now use VMM 2008 R2 to place as many virtual machines as they like on a shared LUN, and Live Migrate individual machines between cluster nodes. Previously it was only possible to migrate all the virtual machines on a LUN to a new node, with the result that virtual machines often had to be stored far less efficiently on a "one virtual machine per LUN" basis.

VMM R2 2008 R2 also enables administrators to reduce storage costs by matching storage allocation with actual requirements more efficiently. It does this by allowing the hot addition (and removal) of storage to running virtual machines, without any downtime. This means that virtual machines can initially be allocated a minimum amount of storage. As the virtual machine's storage requirements grow, administrators can easily use VMM 2008 R2 to add virtual hard disks (VHDs) or iSCSI pass-through disks to the machine, reclaiming them for reallocation if storage requirements subsequently decline.

Reduced Network Throughput
VMM 2008 R2 enables virtual machines to be migrated from a standalone server into a cluster (or in the opposite direction) using a SAN transfer. This can be useful when administrators want to move a virtual machine from a test environment into a production cluster, for example, and because it is achieved using a SAN transfer it is much more time efficient, and less demanding on network infrastructure, than copying the virtual machine over the local area network byte for byte.

These are just a few of the business benefits that organisations can expect from VMM 2008 R2 – there are many more new features in this release that can offer other significant business benefits. But what is clear from this brief introduction is that VMM 2008 R2 provides a more comprehensive, powerful, and effective way than ever before for administrators to manage a virtual infrastructure and more fully realise the business benefits of virtualization.