Why Datacenter Modernization Starts with Virtualization Choice

"Take advantage of infrastructure modernization opportunities by investigating the suitability of new vendors and different server virtualization technologies."

  -Gartner 2020 Market Guide for Virtualization - 11/03/2020

When I started my VMware consultancy in early 2005, virtual machines could already be found across the globe, and VMware vMotion had been shipping for well over a year. Yet the most common objection we would encounter from IT professionals: “You will never put my production server into a virtual machine!!”

We can certainly laugh about this today, yet many organizations still run physical servers, and many others run only legacy stand-alone hypervisors – at least on-premises. Gartner, who is in the business of projecting IT trends, years ago saw what was happening with the transformation of virtualization in the public cloud provider space, and on March 16, 2017, retired its Magic Quadrant for Virtualization. With one million AWS customers alone, the number of VMs running on KVM-based hypervisors (whether on-premises or in the cloud) should easily outnumber those running on legacy commercial hypervisors. 

Physical Server Hugging 

In my international travels, I’ve found that many countries, especially in Asia, lag when it comes to virtualization. Gartner even calls this out in its 2020 Market Guide for Virtualization, saying, “In geographies with slower adoption of hypervisor based virtualization, HCI is the primary driver of increasing usage of server virtualization (notably, China).” 

However, even in the U.S. and Canada, many organizations still maintain physical servers. Last month, I presented at the SINC IT & Security Leaders Forum, and one of my polling questions was, “How Virtualized Are You?” While perhaps not representative of a full North American sampling, I was surprised to find that only 20% of the respondents were fully virtualized while 25% “still have a long way to go.”  

In many cases, the reluctance to replace physical servers with virtual may be due to vendors who still do not certify their software in a virtual machine. But in many others, it is because the organizations’ SANs are out of capacity, or their IT staffs are simply too busy “keeping the lights on” in their SAN-based environments to have the time to dedicate to virtualizing their remaining physical servers. Quite often, these servers are the more resource-demanding machines, such as large database servers, and therefore the most difficult to virtualize. 

Having between 5% and 30% of an organization’s servers still physical may not seem like a significant burden, but the cost is far greater than the cost of a virtual environment due to the requirement to rack, power, upgrade and individually manage them. Moreover, the physical servers do not benefit from the automatic failover of virtual machines to a new host when a physical server goes down. Also, virtual machines can be easily replicated to a disaster recovery site or to the public cloud. 

Cloud-era Virtualization 

All the leading public cloud providers other than Azure include their own KVM-based hypervisors integrated into their software defined stacks (and even Azure does not run a commercial hypervisor). This is the same “cloud-era” virtualization approach used by Nutanix which integrates its KVM-based hypervisor, AHV, into its software-defined HCI stack. 

Cloud-era virtualization is vastly simpler than the legacy stand-alone commercial hypervisors. For one thing, there is no separate management tier to purchase, set up, and configure, let alone figure out how to make secure, scalable, and resilient. The KVM-based hypervisors require no IT admin certifications – at least nothing like those of stand-alone commercial hypervisors. No one, for example, needs to get an advanced certification in AWS, GCP, or Nutanix AHV virtualization. The hypervisors are scalable, resilient, and just there - invisible. 

“Virtualization shouldn’t be something you have to manage. With Nutanix AHV, virtualization is invisible for us now.” 

-William La Hay, IT Team Lead 

Calgary Catholic School District 

Nutanix AHV makes it incredibly easy and affordable for organizations to virtualize their remaining physical, resource-intensive servers. There is no SAN to purchase, storage network to deploy, or storage administrator required. There is no virtualization software to buy, management software to configure, or virtualization administrator needed.  

One Size Does Not Have to Fit All 

“Nutanix enables us to keep up with our fast growth rate with a very small IT team...The competitor was great back in 2008, but it has really lost its edge over other the hypervisor vendors…The complexity and the amount of work it took to keep that environment running was becoming a drain on our IT team. Moving away from the previous solution to AHV was a very positive move for our organization.” 

-Jason Olivares, Senior Systems, Administrator 

Texas A&M University 

While Texas A&M runs all its workloads on AHV, 48% of Nutanix customers still run VMware vSphere, and many customers run both AHV and vSphere on Nutanix HCI. This is in line with Gartner’s recommendation in its 2020 Market Guide for Virtualization: “Embrace a multipronged approach for server virtualization.” 

Nutanix customers do not compromise by running AHV instead of a stand-alone hypervisor. The past 12 months of reviews in Gartner’s Server Virtualization Reviews and Ratings ranks AHV as the highest rated (4.9 stars out of 5) hypervisor of the leading virtualization platforms reviewed. 

The March 4, 2021 Enterprise Networking Planet issue, Best Server Virtualization Software of 2021, includes a glowing review of Nutanix AHV, saying: 

“Nutanix AHV aims to simplify the world of server virtualization. It does away with the model that views virtualization as a complex layer of the IT stack that is licensed, deployed, and managed separately. Instead, Nutanix AHV offers a secure, enterprise-grade virtualization solution that can provision and optimize VMs and containers, monitor infrastructure and application performance, scale your environment, and automate mundane IT operations.” 

 Under Key Differentiators of AHV, the article includes: 

•  Smooth implementation of security, network microsegmentation, as well as built-in configuration audit and remediation 
• Lower operational costs reported compared to other virtualization solutions. 

The microsegmentation, auditing and compliance capability of AHV referred to in the article results from Nutanix Flow. Flow is easily deployed with a single click. David Harold, Senior Manager of CarMax Enterprise Systems, said: 

“Flow provides network segmentation capabilities that greatly enhance security...We’ve seen quite a bit of performance improvement on our applications running on Nutanix, which has been great.” 

Thomas Brown, one of the many VMware VCDXs who work for Nutanix, sums up the most important advantage of Nutanix HCI and AHV: 

 “Nutanix not only brings the simplicity of web-scale architecture to the datacenter, but also the performance. This allows businesses to focus on business outcomes rather than on infrastructure. And they will be able to more efficiently obtain them.”  

How Will Virtualizing Your Physical Servers Benefit You? 

Nutanix makes virtualization so easy, that even virtualizing just 10 physical servers typically offers a positive ROI, measured in months, not years. And once the servers are virtualized, if you desire, you can typically move them with less effort, and at a lower cost, to public cloud. You can even utilize your same Nutanix licensing on both on-premises and in public cloud. 

To learn how much you can save with Nutanix cloud-era virtualization, email [email protected] 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the author and not necessarily those of Nutanix, Inc. or any of its other employees or affiliates.