Managing the move to virtualization and cloud

Managing the move to virtualization and cloud

August 2013

Managing the move to virtualization and cloud whitepaper

1. Introduction

Enterprise data centres have traditionally used servers and storage that typically scale only to a few nodes. Even small capacity

or performance scales required large installation increments or worse, required replicating the existing IT infrastructure, which

is prohibitive in terms of cost and space. An important impediment was that as storage capacity increased, system performance

and efficiency suffered. In addition, IT budgets came under pressure and created high entry barriers to scale for enterprise class

data centres. However, virtualization and cloud platforms are changing that. IT departments can now linearly scale to several

server and storage nodes rapidly, for capacity and performance without compromising on efficiency and to keep costs under

control. This helps save space via hardware consolidation, improves productivity, and derives a competitive advantage through

increased availability, lean administration, and fast deployment times.

A shift into a virtual or cloud environment can be difficult. Companies with tremendous in-house capabilities can effectively

deploy large scale virtual and cloud platforms and often this forms their core business activity. Those with different core

business activities cannot afford the same engineering resources and financial capital spend on IT. This further raises entry

barriers, and puts enterprise class virtual and cloud data centres out of reach. While moving to virtualization and cloud,

enterprises and ISVs repeatedly experience these pain points. However, a hardened and repeatable workflow can replace the

resource deficit. When co-executed with a viable solution partner, enterprises and ISVs can smoothly shift to virtualized

or cloud platforms.

Figure 1. – Scaling without virtualization and cloud


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1. Introduction















or cloud platforms.


2. Adopting virtualization and cloud in data centres

2.1. Virtualizing the data centre

Every business’s requirements differ. In a virtualized environment, these requirements only become more important. Although

large consolidation ratios of virtualization have their merits, resources must be readily available when businesses need them.

A product development team, a web application, or an accounts team’s demand for capacity or performance might suddenly

scale up and may or may not last for long. Besides spurts in demand, the virtualized application must be capable of seamless

failover, backup, and failback. This means SLAs, RTOs, and RPOs will need thorough re-examining for comprehensive disaster

tolerance. Any compromises in such considerations will put business continuity at risk.

2.1.1. Vendor considerations

Virtualized applications could easily overwhelm a shared storage or network infrastructure and dilute the benefits of cost,

power, and space savings. Moreover, backup applications in virtualized environments could impose performance penalties

depending on the solution architecture. With the right tools, trade-offs or improvements to performance and system resilience

on products from various vendors will be clear. Heterogeneous data centres may require assessing vendors with backup

applications that can restore applications on different virtual platforms, including between physical and virtual (P2V), V2P, and

V2V. Mechanisms such as live migration of applications from one system to another impose hardware requirements that several

vendors can meet. As a result, organizations need to consider:

• Selecting the right virtualization suite

• The right networking architecture

• The right storage platform

• Identifying consolidation ratios

• High availability considerations for storage and networking

• Detailing performance requirements

• Ease of upgrades, fixes, and troubleshooting

• Selecting the right backup and restore applications

• Designing failover and failback mechanisms within acceptable RTO/RPO windows

• Ease of deploying applications and resources

2.1.2. Implementing workflows

After making these decisions, the next step is to deploy the virtualized environment, apply best practices, and install ISV

applications using predefined templates. A comparison of the performance of the new solution with the non-virtualized

solution helps fine-tune it. These measures can guarantee a smooth transition to virtualization and help anyone realize the full

benefits of a virtual infrastructure.

2.2. Moving the data centre to cloud

Virtualizing applications and solutions opens up the doorway to cloud. The biggest advantage with the cloud is the ability to

scale for capacity and performance linearly. With the cloud acting as a utility, chargebacks let organizations pay only for the

consumption of computing, network, storage, and software licenses over time. Moreover, the cloud service providers ensure

these resources are readily available so users do not have to wait for them to free up. To provide multiple users or tenants cloud

access, organizations can choose between moving applications like email and databases to the cloud, and using a SaaS version

of these applications in the cloud.

2.2.1. Establishing cloud business needs

Business requirements define whether to choose from private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud (different cloud vendors) and

whether the cloud service chosen is an IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS service or a combination of them. A movement to the cloud should

not result in any compromise on IT’s ability in disaster tolerance, recovery and failback. Moving to the cloud must consider

regulatory compliance requirements that define data protection, and backup, and restore policies. While cost of data migration

is important, a cloud gateway could serve as a cheaper intermediary step to migrating data into the cloud. In choosing a cloud

service provider, businesses must evaluate:

• Identifying the right solution (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, public, private, hybrid, mixed)

• Vendor platform

• ROI of deployment, migration, and re-engineering

• Identifying compliance and regulatory requirements

• Detailing security, access, and monitoring measures

• Support and business continuity

• Service portfolio of the provider

• Ease of deployment, performance testing, and tuning

2.2.2. Distinguishing cloud’s business outcomes

The primary goal of moving to the cloud is to reduce the TCO via licensing cost savings, hardware and upgrade elimination, and

administrative overhead reduction. It also increases execution speed and hence productivity; it provides scaling and is readily

available. Once these outcomes are clear, meeting an organization’s cloud needs requires: selecting the cloud service provider,

assessing the target environment, and re-engineering custom applications. Collaborating with the right cloud solution provider

helps organizations focus on their core business activity to successfully achieve the desired business outcomes.

3. Adopting virtualization and cloud for ISVs

3.1. Virtualizing ISV applications

While deploying virtualized applications, customers prefer pre-qualified ISV applications and put paramount importance on

performance. ISV applications are usually qualified for compatibility and performance on virtualized platforms by a preferred

partner solution provider. The solution provider ensures application behavior and performance remains consistent and works

with the ISV to provide:

• Multiple platform/OS support

• Ease of application deployment

• Monitoring and control features

• Easy upgrades, fixes, and troubleshooting

• Flexible licensing models

• Multilingual automation support

• Functional, usability, and UI testing

3.1.1. Virtualization enablement workflow

An ISV’s choice of virtual platform influences the process of virtualization enablement. This entails deploying test systems,

identifying end user scenarios, configuring systems, designing test cases, executing tests, analyzing and triage results, and

publishing results. Virtual environments are shared platforms hence it is important to fine-tune the virtual environment to

optimize performance of applications against known benchmarks. Once this step is complete, generating appropriate real time

workloads ensures successful stress tests and performance tests on these virtualized applications.

3.1.2. Harnessing the benefits of virtual appliances

An appliance is a pre-configured application in a virtual machine, which enables effortless deployment and reduces training and

administrative costs. Creating virtual appliances requires deep understanding of application building tools, test methodologies,

packaging formats, deployment techniques, and the appliance certification process. Furthermore, publishing the appliance’s

ROI, cost reductions, and TCO parameters helps customers better realize a product’s benefits. While creating appliances,

making them compatible with a widely adopted virtualization platform, such as VMware vSpherei, provides known interfaces to

customers. This also allows customers to become familiar with the appliance quicker and reduces training costs and time. It is

important that the solution provider can identify with the ISVs goals of creating and deploying appliances for its customers. In

many organizations, virtualization also sets the tone to their future migration into cloud.

3.1.3. Preparing for future opportunities

There is no doubt that virtualizing applications helps an ISV increase their product footprint and ease of product adoption.

Additionally, it pays off when the ISV charts a product roadmap that extends beyond virtualization enablement. Once the

roadmap is planned, recognizing roadblocks and removing them paves a way towards a future in the cloud.

3.2. ISV in the cloud

Once virtualized, ISVs can host their applications in a cloud platform for adoption from an audience beyond traditional data

centres. There can be no compromise in the architecture of application security, availability, performance, chargeback

mechanisms, system integration, and data protection mechanisms. Once again, collaborating with the right solution provider

helps ISVs in evaluating and implementing cloud enablement requirements such as:

• High availability

• Backup, restore, failover, and failback mechanisms

• Performance testing and tuning

• Packaging the application

• Platform abstraction

• Multi-cloud support

• Designing identity management, security, and data protection mechanisms

• Generating blueprints and templates of the solution stack

• Generating a service catalogue from the application package or solution stack

• Chargeback and metering mechanisms

3.2.1. Preparing for peak workloads

Cloud ready applications must deliver capacity and performance on demand as desired by end users. When a customer’s video

streaming application sees a peak in demand, the cloud appliance hosting the video must have self-provisioning abilities to cater

to it. When more users log into and generate reports on an ISV’s analytics, CRM, database, or ERP appliance in the cloud, it needs

to keep up with the performance or data storage capacity scaling needs. Besides comprehensively testing the ISV application for

such use cases, ISVs must also provide practical billing, chargeback, troubleshooting, triaging, and support offerings

to customers.

3.2.2. Using an ISV cloud migration factory

The process at a cloud migration factory begins with an environment readiness on the cloud platform. This helps identify

specific software or hardware requirements. Subsequently re-engineering either the cloud environment or the application

ensures a compatible framework. Follow this by creating a blueprint that provides standards for build, test, and deployment

environment for the application. Blueprints specify the hardware requirements, the virtual platform requirements, and the

storage, compute, and network requirements. An additional certification step from the cloud platform provider or virtualization

vendor provides another seal of robustness via a thorough review of the migration activity. Finally, creating a cloud migration

framework that packages an application using the blueprint within a readily deployable virtual machine helps to create a readily

deployable appliance on any target environment.

3.2.3. Identifying integration touch points

Several applications require customization and platform integration to become cloud ready. As an example, collaboration

software on the cloud might require integration with single sign on and identity management applications like Microsoft’s Active

Directoryii or with a WAN optimization appliance. This may involve re-engineering of the cloud platform, or integrating third

party applications with the ISV application. Moreover, these applications may run in public, private, hybrid or mixed cloud

environments, thus increasing the number of integration points. Once again, collaborating with the right solution provider will

accelerate integration. Regardless of the challenges, the cloud benefits both customers and ISVs. Furthermore, as enterprise

cloud adoption increases, cloud ready ISV applications will become a rule rather than an exception.

4.1. Summary

The IT landscape is rapidly evolving, spearheaded by cloud solutions. Newer services beyond the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are already

making their mark. Shifting to virtualization and cloud provides companies linear performance and capacity scale without

compromising efficiency. At the same time, moving to the new cloud landscape requires thorough preparation and strong

capability. As this landscape matures, it becomes imperative for enterprises and ISVs to build repeatable and proven processes

that manage a company’s information lifecycle and embrace the new offerings. Finally, a solution partner with the right set of

capabilities, solutions, and experience on virtualization and cloud can help enterprises and ISVs sustain the shift to and beyond

virtualization and cloud. This eliminates barriers to entry into cloud, generates competitive advantage, and enables new

experiences for customers.

4.2. iGATE’s readiness in Cloud and Virtualization

iGATE’s Storage, Networks, and Computing (SNC) practice takes pride in being an Ecosystem Engineering partner in the key

areas of cloud computing and virtualization. Our SNC services portfolio includes new product architecture design and core R&D

as well as sustaining engineering and after market product support.

We have garnered significant expertise in enabling virtualization and cloud for over 400 customers. This experience has helped

customers drive costs down while enabling applications on the cloud or virtual platforms. Our proficiency in the virtualization

and cloud enablement extends to mature and hardened workflows that help deliver rapid results for our customers. Our ability

to build end-to-end solutions and deploy them has helped our customers shorten their product lifecycles, increase adoption of

cloud and virtualization, and reduce their TCO.

Figure 2. – Scaling with cloud, repeatable processes and the right partner

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4.3. About the author

Bhaskar Jayaraman works in iGATE’s P&ES business unit, which provides product engineering and IT solutions to various clients

in the enterprise computing, healthcare, and industrial automation space. Bhaskar has significant experience in the cloud,

storage, and server industry and has worked in the software industry for the past 13 years at companies such as IBM, HP, and

LSI. He has a degree in computers from the University of Pune and holds an MBA degree from the University of St. Gallen.

4.4. References

iVMware vSphere ® with Operations Management™

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/overview.html

iiActive Directory Federation Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb897402.aspx

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