Scotland's Digital Future: Scottish Public Sector Data Centre Virtualisation Guidance

Virtualisation roadmap to the cloud

Deploying virtualisation technologies could be an organisations first step in preparing to move into cloud computing. With that end goal in mind, following the steps below will give organisations more flexibility in choosing how to host their services and infrastructure in the future.

Initiation: The first step should be defining your goals, and producing detailed requirements that outline exactly what you need. This includes an inventory and description of your current environment. This will help you figure out what your potential virtualisation use cases might be.

Plan & Design: This phase plans and designs how the server would be configured.

If you're consolidating workloads, you need to also consider the network and storage needs for your virtual machines. Remember that you're going to be combining not only the memory and CPU requirements for each virtual server, but also the network and storage requirements.

If you're going to be consolidating existing workloads, you need to start getting baselines of those workloads if you don't already have them. At least 30 days if possible, and running at peak demand. Then start sketching out the hardware that you'll need, the storage requirements, management requirements and the possible solutions.

Build: This phase configures the virtual machine. Thus, the question that should be asked is as follows: How do I implement server virtualization to accomplish the goals?

Manage : It's easy to deploy new virtual machines and workloads, which means it's tempting to just fire up another virtual machine without necessarily considering all options. The machines may not require physical hardware, but they still need to be managed. Organisations should still follow policies for acquiring new "servers" and not change their strategies because it's suddenly easier to deploy new servers.

Migrate to cloud: once the data is decoupled from the hardware the move to the cloud becomes easier, organisations should now start considering organisational risks and look at assessing cloud computing as an option.