Cisco predicts that by 2020, 92% of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers. Increasing numbers of SMBs and enterprises are flocking to virtual data centers to leverage the speed and agility virtualized servers offer. Whether you’ve already made the move or are considering data center virtualization, these best practices deserve your consideration.
Leveraging virtual data centers as part of your disaster recovery plan, you can reduce costs and increase recovery times. You can failover to a virtual server in realtime and back again to speed up your recovery time, and you can test all this with minimal interruption to even your most critical business processes.
While virtualization can promise cost savings in terms of eliminating expensive hardware, maintenance of a physical server and labor hours, it’s important to plan for the costs of a data center migration and beware of any hidden costs like new software licenses for cloud-based apps.
As with any system that runs mission critical applications, it is critical to run ongoing performance analysis and testing. The applications we use and data we require constantly change, frequent tests are required to understand how the data center is performing and how it should best be optimized.
Understand your most I/O intensive apps and how much storage they take up. You may be able to make adjustments to decrease I/O workload and save money by avoiding buying new storage. Even today not all independent software vendors support their server-based applications on virtual servers; understand the impact migrating to a virtual data center will have before you make the move.
Security is more complex in a virtual environment because you must monitor the physical host and the end user machines. With more complex attacks, it pays to be be proactive, do a risk assessment, and put policies in place to maintain a secure environment. These can include password guidelines and segmenting and isolating traffic with firewalls.
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