Virtualization is here to stay. Between the many competing technologies (VMWare, Xen, Oracle VM, Cloud Computing, etc) and the proven benefits (cost reductions, improved management, DR and HA) – virtualization is on the "Must Do" list for most IT organizations. However, questions remain. How does this affect my OTM deployment? Will it run? Will performance be affected? Will it be supported? Which technologies are best to base my architecture on? What pitfalls are out there that I can avoid? What are the best practices for deployment? These and many other questions will be covered as Chris Plough shares many of the lessons learned while testing and deploying OTM with multiple clients and within MavenWire's Hosting Architecture. Presented by Chris Plough at MavenWire.

1. Virtualizing OTM:
Real World Experiences and Pitfalls

2. MavenWire: Agenda
! Overview
! Why Virtualize?
! Why Not Virtualize?
! Types of Virtualization
! What Works
! What Doesn’t
! The Cloud
! Performance
! Q & A

3. Overview: Why Virtualize?
! But Ma! Everyone’s doing it!

4. Overview: Why Virtualize?
! Get ready for a long list!
! Ease of:
! Environment deployment
! Environment agility
! Data backup and archival
! HA / DR configuration
! Reduced costs for:
! Datacenter costs (energy, cooling, etc)
! Hardware maintenance
! Plus, it’s cool!

5. Overview: Why Not Virtualize?
! Rebel against the mainstream

6. Overview: Why Not Virtualize?
! Complexities
! Hardware and infrastructure
! Maintenance interdependencies
! Costs
! Hardware and infrastructure costs
! Sliding scale
! Premium skill set
! Licensing models are catching up
! Performance
! Overhead of virtualization
! Security Concerns

7. Overview: Types of Virtualization
! Vmware
! Partially supported by Oracle
! Xen (Oracle VM)
! Fully supported by Oracle
! AWS EC2 – is it considered virtualization?
! Yes – and more. It’s virtualization, without
buying hardware and with additional
services.
! Partially supported by Oracle

8. Overview: Definition Time!
! Paravirtualization
! In computing, paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that presents
a software interface to virtual machines that is similar but not identical to
that of the underlying hardware.
! Hardware-assisted virtualization
! Hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) offers new instructions to support
direct calls by a paravirtualized guest/driver into the hypervisor, typically
used for I/O or other so-called hypercalls. It also provides additional
execution modes: "root mode" and "non-root mode".

9. What Works?
! Most of the benefits
! In one word - Management
! Deployment!
! Environments available in under 30 mins
! Backups
! More data – more risk, easier to backup
! DR / HA
! Disagree with HA – akin to standard clustering
! Agility

10. What Doesn’t?
! Automatic OTM Performance Scaling
! (It’s not really even a feature!)

11. What Doesn’t?
! Seriously – be on the watch for:
! Driver Issues
! Rapidly evolving technology
! i.e. Frequent upgrades
! Vendor lock-in
! Oversubscribing your hardware
! Single points of failure
! Traditional change control
! Concerns that are being addressed
! Performance and Security!
! Vendor support

12. Random Picture

13. The Cloud: AWS EC2
! How do services like Amazon’s EC2 fit in?
! First – simply AMAZING for DEV environments
! Benefits
! Completely on-demand
! Highly scalable (just not with OTM)
! Rapidly evolving
! Cons
! Security concerns – times 10
! Poor per-server (instance) performance
! Evolving network management
! Less cost effective (point of argument)

14. The Cloud: AWS EC2 - Details
! My main concerns have been addressed
(mostly)
! Persistent storage for instances
! Can now use EBS as the instance storage
! Storage I/O performance
! EBS (mostly) addresses these
! DBs still a concern
! Future releases will address network mgmnt
! Allocate specific IPs with persistence
! Enterprise-level VPN connectivity options
! Future Oracle Competitor? Amazon RDS

15. Performance: VolanoMark
Higher is Better

16. Performance: Hammerora
Lower is Better

17. Final Thoughts
! Virtualization is Great for:
! TEST / DEV / QA environments
! Software development
! Many non-intensive applications
! (i.e. not OTM!)
! Virtualization is Not Ready for:
! Production OTM with significant volumes
! It’s only a matter of time. Pick a low-risk (or
skunkworks) project and learn.

18. Discussion: Q & A
! Questions?

19. Thank you
Chris Plough - @cpMavenWire
Find out more at www.MavenWire.com