Implementing a Virtual Server Environment: Getting Started

Chapter 2: Assessing and Planning
Every organization is unique and has different challenges and problems to solve, but all must use a
similar process. This chapter is intended to help you organize your thoughts and plans.
Long-term roadmap
The first step is to identify your organization’s business drivers and long-term goals. For most
customers, the ultimate goal is to create an agile and responsive IT organization, one that aligns with
the needs of the business and, therefore, is both a service to the business and a competitive
advantage. For this reason, it is important to understand the key business drivers and to think about
what you want your environment to look like in the long term. The following are some pertinent
questions and considerations:
• Analyze your application environment and some of your business processes as they relate to
the IT organization. Do you have more than one line of business, and does each line of
business or application group own their own servers for testing and production? Application
“silos” such as this are a leading cause of underutilized servers and server sprawl. One long-
term goal might be to consolidate these applications and allow IT to provision the necessary
resources as they are needed. This approach can allow the application groups to focus on
meeting the needs of the businesses they support instead of worrying about the IT
infrastructure.
• Are you expecting significant growth in the business or growth through acquisitions or
mergers? If so, is it important to be able to deploy new applications or new instances of
existing applications quickly? Some HP VSE customers find that a virtualized environment
allows them to deploy a new application in days rather than months.
• Do you need to achieve a 24x7 environment or add a disaster-recovery capability? HP
virtualization technologies are well integrated with the HP Serviceguard suite of high-
availability and disaster-tolerant solutions.
• Do you have to support and maintain many different versions of the operating system and
application software? Does your organization already have certain standardized processes,
or is each application group completely independent? If you consolidate and share
resources, what kinds of internal or “political” issues will you need to address? These issues
might not be trivial to solve, but it is important to understand them. You can address many
problems and pain points using the virtualization technologies within these “application
silos,” but in the long run, customers who can also solve the business process issues will
benefit the most from a Virtual Serve Environment and can achieve a more robust Adaptive
Infrastructure.
Short-term roadmap
As previously described, defining a long-term architecture for a virtualized environment requires
significant thought and planning, and perhaps even some significant changes in your IT infrastructure
and business processes. The good news is that the VSE architecture does not have to be completely
defined before you can take advantage of HP virtualization technologies. You may need to address
some pain points and solve some short term problems first.
It is clear that most companies need to reduce their infrastructure costs. The problems of
overprovisioning, underutilized servers, server sprawl, paying too much for software licenses and
support, increasing cost of power and cooling, and simply running out of space in the data center are
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