Credit Union IT Shops Need a Virtualization Strategy

by: Sanjay Castelino, VP and Market Leader, SolarWinds

Credit Unions tend to operate their IT environments with an eye toward efficiency and cost effectiveness.  While there has been huge growth in credit unions financially, they tend to retain “a lean and mean” attitude with respect to IT bells and whistles.  But as credit unions have grown out of the backlash to the banking industry, many IT shops have had to grow the footprint of their server and virtualization environment.

This growth often highlights the increasing costs associated with the virtual environment.  This includes the server hypervisor software, which provides a layer above the physical server that carves up the server into distinct virtual servers running separate operating systems and software, as well as associated hypervisor management costs, predominantly for VMware virtualization products. With rising costs and the release of an improved Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 hypervisor on the horizon, now is the time for credit union IT shops to make sure they have a solid hypervisor strategy in place.

VMware vSphere versus Microsoft Hyper-V

VMware has had the most mature, production-ready hypervisor in the market with Virtual Center and vSphere and as a result has dominated the server virtualization market.  However, along with their Cadillac capabilities comes a Cadillac price.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V capability has been a distant second in market share in line with hypervisor capabilities that are often more resource intensive and lack key production features.

The big positive feature for Hyper-V is that it is free with its Windows Server. Microsoft is looking to shake up the market with their upcoming release of Hyper-V version 3.0 which will have more efficient resource utilization, key production features and even some areas where they will try to exceed what VMware provides today.  Given that Hyper-V version 3.0 will still be free with Windows Server 8, now is the perfect time to start developing a hypervisor strategy that will reduce software costs, maintain service levels and productivity while minimizing risk.

Credit unions currently using VMware and looking for cost savings should at least evaluate a two-hypervisor strategy to maintain hardware utilization but reduce VMware licensing costs.

Key Steps to Developing a Hypervisor Strategy

Some of the key steps to developing a hypervisor strategy around VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V include:

1.  Understanding what workloads are running on what hypervisors or platforms today

2.  Looking at plans around Windows Server 8 adoption since that is where Hyper-V 3.0 will be included

3.  Baselining people and processes

• Do you have any Hyper-V skills?
• How engrained are the business processes with the VMware tools?
• How disruptive would introduction of a second hypervisor be to current processes?

4.  Understanding current and projected VMware costs

5.  Determining your VM monitoring and management capability for a heterogeneous environment

With this baseline data you have the foundation for developing your virtualization strategy.  For most companies currently running VMware without any Hyper-V implementation, this boils down to an evaluation of:

• The disruption of caused by changing technologies
• The cost savings of moving to a lower cost hypervisor technology
• Determination of lower risk or performance workloads to get initial ROI and gain skills and experience
• Analysis of options to ensure that you can effectively manage capacity and performance of VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V in a heterogeneous environment

Even though Hyper-V 3.0 isn’t out yet, developing a proactive strategy makes it easier to integrate options into budgeting processes, hiring plans and technology refresh cycles.  Doing it now can help the credit union IT shop stay at the forefront of cost effective IT service delivery with the minimum of pain.

Sanjay Castelino is a VP and Market Leader at SolarWinds, an IT management software provider based in Austin, Texas. Sanjay leads the company’s initiatives around its end-to-end IT solutions for network, SIEM, storage and virtualization management. He is responsible for our product strategy and go-to-market efforts in these markets.  www.solarwinds.com