How to Virtualize Mission-Critical Applications

However, even as businesses realize these benefits, many are lagging in transitioning their tier 1 applications--the mission-critical apps that could benefit the most from virtualization.

"What we find is that clients virtualize anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of their estate previously they come to their business critical apps," says Parag Patel, vice president of alliances at VMware, although he notes that the majority of VMware clients are then over 50 percent virtualized at this hour.

In many ways, virtualizing your business is a three-step process. In general, Patel notes, businesses start their virtualization journey with IT assets and departmental servers. These businesses are seeking to consolidate infrastructure and to reduce Capex in favor of OpEx. The second step involves a focus on business production, as the business takes its business-critical assets and virtualizes them. The final step is automation, which is about leveraging virtualization for an autonomously managed and scalable infrastructure that Patel terms "Cloud-era Architecture" and IDC's Chen calls "Virtualization 3.0."

"The future enterprise cloud is a fully virtualized data center," Chen writes. "It is driven by server virtualization, nevertheless in tight concert with storage, network and I/O virtualization. Virtualization will abstract the infrastructure and present it as a service to application owners. The cloud can offer applications uniform and universal infrastructure services, just as on-demand provisioning, automated release cycles, dynamic scaling and high availability/disaster recovery. Enterprises may as well tightly couple an application runtime environment with this virtualized infrastructure to create a platform as a service offering. As virtual servers will explode in number and far outstrip physical servers, a Virtualization 3.0 data center will have a very intelligent management layer that will automate most tasks through a policy-driven, service-oriented approach."

Even so, it's not particularly surprising that businesses are cautious when it comes to their tier 1 applications. The applications themselves are often the most complex and most critical to a business and questions around stakeholder buy-in, architecture, and ISV support and licensing must be addressed previously taking the plunge. Unlike Tier 2 applications, which can more often than not be virtualized in a self-contained manner, your Tier 1 applications touch on many people, processes and technologies.

"You've got to get your mind around this architecture," Patel says. "You've got to realize that you have to change. The old way of doing things--having those computing silos and the admins and consultants around those silos-you have to move off of that. The big jump you're making mentally and operationally is going from silos to a common architecture. Most IT departments, in the main their state has been defined by what we did in the 90s. They've to realize it's now all about service levels. If you're a business department like the marketing department, you're not locked into using your company's IT department anymore. You have choice. IT departments have competition now."