What is a workload?
At the most basic level, a workload encapsulates the data, applications and operating system that reside on a physical or virtual host. Organizations are beginning to view the data center as a set of portable workload units instead of a mix of servers, operating systems, applications and data. The ability to profile, move, copy, protect and replicate these workload units at will between physical and virtual hosts is a key enabler for operational efficiency and business success.
The Workload Lifecycle
There are many different kinds of workloads running in the data center, each with their own resource and availability requirements which may change over time. For instance, financial reporting applications may place heavy demands on server resources at month’s end, or a web server may experience unpredictable traffic spikes. Moreover a workload that is deemed business-critical such as a web server or mail server requires greater levels of protection and availability than a less critical workload like a print server.
Though workloads differ greatly, every workload tends to undergo a number of common changes throughout its lifecycle – workloads are provisioned, protected, consolidated and migrated to new hardware, reconfigured and retired. Many of the greatest challenges in the data center are related to changing workload requirements and managing the transitions that occur throughout the workload lifecycle.
What is Unified Workload Lifecycle Management?
The unified workload management approach combines two key concepts – the workload profile and workload portability – in order to establish a common approach to effectively manage workloads.
The Workload Profile
To effectively manage workloads, each workload unit must have a profile attached to it. The workload profile is a key description of attributes such as:
- The purpose of the workload
- The owner of the workload
- The inventory of the workload
- The software and services running on the workload
- The current resource allocation and actual requirements of the workload
A workload profile contains not only the name and inventory of a server but also captures the server’s current resource requirements based on real performance data. The workload profile follows the workload throughout its entire lifecycle, allowing organizations to make decisions about how best to manage and protect the workload based on the data contained in its profile rather than relying on best guesses.
Workload Portability
Until very recently, organizations migrating to virtual infrastructures have tended to focus on simple one-time physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations. While automating P2V migrations is one critical component for the successful adoption of virtualization, it does not address the ongoing requirement for anywhere-to-anywhere workload portability in the data center or the need to utilize workload profile data for continuous optimization.
The flexibility to move and rebalance workloads in any direction between physical and virtual hosts – physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-physical, physical-to-physical, in and out of imaging formats and so on – ensures optimal data center efficiency. It also enables organizations to better address common challenges such as end-of-lease hardware migration and periodic necessities such as the devirtualization of applications to account for changing workloads or to comply with support agreements.
Four Pillars of Workload Lifecycle Management
Most data centers face a similar set of problems that arise over and over again in the course of day-to-day operations. These issues, which typically relate to a lack of workload portability, can be broken into four key areas: workload relocation, workload protection, workload provisioning and workload optimization.
The conventional approach to solving these problems involves investing in a variety of different software solutions, utilities and implementation consultants to address each specific problem. Organizations purchase one solution for disaster recovery requirements and a completely different solution for automating new server provisioning, and so on.
A unified workload management approach encourages data center managers to think strategically rather than tactically, moving beyond a “once-and-done” project-based view to adopt a common approach for addressing a whole host of IT problems including:
PlateSpin’s Workload Strategy
The benefits of a unified approach to lifecycle management include new efficiencies in the data center, increased resource utilization and a significant reduction in the costs and overhead associated with ongoing data center management.
PlateSpin’s core products include features and functionality that support this broad vision of unified workload lifecycle management. Future releases will further expand and enhance this rich feature set. Our ultimate goal is to expand and integrate our advanced workload profiling and portability capabilities to provide a single, comprehensive platform for unifying workload lifecycle management and simplifying the approach to common data center initiatives.