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Written by / Zhi Ling Haina (SmartX) Zhang Tao
In recent years, more and more enterprises have begun to focus on the innovative development of information technology applications, with “virtualization” being one of the key areas of interest in the industry. Especially during the transition from traditional IT infrastructure to distributed architecture, if a self-developed virtualization system can be adopted simultaneously, it will achieve a twofold effect. At present, although many improvement solutions related to virtualization have emerged in the market, most of them remain at the level of supporting virtual desktops, development, and testing, and have not truly solved the pain points faced by enterprises. This article attempts to analyze the typical routes and assessment points for adopting self-virtualization technology in production environments, hoping to provide useful references for domestic enterprises in their solution selection process.
Research on Infrastructure Update Strategies Centered on Virtualization
The core of virtualization application systems is the Hypervisor and storage. In terms of virtualization systems, VMware’s vSphere, as the most mature Hypervisor, occupies a crucial position in today’s virtualization market. Therefore, when enterprises face potential “downtime” risks, they must first consider what kind of technology and products can support the gaps left by vSphere. Additionally, the data, which is most closely associated with application workloads, must maintain integrity and consistency when migrating applications from vSphere virtualization to other systems. Therefore, it is also necessary to consider whether related storage products need to be replaced.
Besides the Hypervisor and storage, the virtualization application system in a production environment also involves a series of related functions and components such as networking, management, automation, backup, and recovery, but they are secondary factors. Therefore, the first step is to determine the method and approach for transforming the virtualization core and storage, and to ensure a smooth migration of existing applications to the new virtualization system and storage, before considering alternative products for other components, completing the integration of all selected product components in the production environment in phases and steps.
The specific ideas for updating the virtualization core system and storage facilities can be summarized into the following two routes:
1. Introduce self-developed virtualization software while considering storage
In the deployment environment of virtualization applications, most enterprises use centralized SAN storage in conjunction with computing virtualization products, connecting virtual machines and storage through standard interfaces like iSCSI and NFS. Therefore, the storage transformation of virtualization applications will mainly focus on centralized SAN storage products. According to an IDC report from the first half of 2021, the top three companies in the Chinese enterprise external storage market are Huawei, H3C, and Inspur, all of which have fully self-developed storage products widely used in virtualization application systems. Based on this, it is recommended to choose more self-developed and mature products in terms of the virtualization system Hypervisor; while the domestic centralized SAN storage devices currently in use can be selectively retained to reduce the data migration workload during technological transformation, with plans to upgrade these storage devices at a later time.
It is worth noting that although domestic IT manufacturers currently possess the capability to independently develop mid-to-high-end storage, most were previously developed based on the x86 platform, while those based on Hygon, Kunpeng, and Feiteng CPU hardware require entirely new designs. Moreover, due to the complexity of the SAN storage system, it often struggles to meet rapidly growing elastic demands, making the transition of centralized SAN storage to “distributed” and “software-defined” a trend. In this transformation, enterprises can also choose to complete the storage transformation first, continue using the existing Hypervisor (like vSphere), and gradually achieve comprehensive updates and transformations.
2. Replace with hyper-converged HCI architecture
During the transformation of virtualization and storage, some enterprises choose to directly replace the “separation of computing and storage” approach with a simpler, more elastic, and agile hyper-converged (HCI) architecture. The IDC has just released the rankings for the first half of 2021, with leading domestic hyper-converged software coming from Huawei, H3C, Sangfor, Inspur, and SmartX. Among them, SmartX, as the only independent hyper-converged vendor, ranks first in the hyper-converged software market in the financial sector, receiving positive feedback from IDC as being “favored in the financial industry”.
From the financial industry cases of vendors like SmartX, it can be seen that hyper-converged solutions have already been validated in production environments. Moreover, choosing independently developed hyper-converged products not only means achieving virtualization transformation but also completing the transition from traditional architecture to distributed architecture and software-defined methods. Domestic hyper-converged solutions are generally compatible with domestically developed servers, achieving decoupling of software and hardware and supporting rapid adaptation. With the continuous upgrade of domestic server products, hyper-converged software can also iterate quickly. At the same time, distributed architecture can solve system redundancy issues through software and overall improve resource pool performance, thus compensating for the current performance deficiencies of domestic CPUs. In addition, the hyper-converged architecture, which includes both virtualization and storage as core components, can simultaneously achieve transformation of the virtualization layer and storage layer, simplifying the hierarchy of virtualization computing and storage, resulting in better elasticity, lower risk, and easier implementation.
These two routes for updating and transforming virtualization and storage have been outlined. However, assessing the various related hardware and software used in the existing virtualization application system, which could number in the dozens, and developing update strategies and methods poses significant challenges.
If we step outside of “component-level” thinking and adopt a private cloud or dedicated cloud approach to overall transformation of the existing virtualization environment, we can also summarize two technical routes:
1. Transition to an overall private cloud solution
Currently, most overall private cloud solutions in China are developed based on OpenStack as the basic technology stack. The comprehensive cloud solution of OpenStack can manage the resource pool of the IaaS layer (servers, storage, and networks) simultaneously, eliminating the need to consider the replacement roadmap of VMware from the perspectives of computing, storage, or networking, but rather rebuilding from the overall “private cloud” dimension. According to the half-year tracking report of the software-defined computing software market released by IDC in 2021, Huawei, H3C, Inspur, EasyStack, and 九州云 rank among the top five in the “cloud system software” category that reflects the OpenStack technology route. From the open-source perspective, the advantage of the OpenStack solution is that it can quickly obtain the latest features from the community. However, on the other hand, the private cloud solutions built on OpenStack and Ceph currently face challenges due to numerous modules, limited commercialization, and inadequate stability, with most deployments occurring in development and testing environments, making it difficult to achieve true unification of user architecture, and some rational enterprises have begun to choose similar architectures more cautiously after the initial hype.
2. Dedicated cloud based on public cloud technology stack
Dedicated cloud refers to a dedicated solution that provides a full-stack resource pool for specific users based on public cloud technology, addressing specific industries and special needs. Dedicated cloud allows users to exclusively use racks, servers, and networks on public cloud, obtaining exclusive usage rights and security through infrastructure isolation. However, the construction and operation of dedicated clouds are still managed by public cloud providers. Overall, dedicated cloud alleviates domestic enterprises’ concerns about security compliance, data privacy, and other issues associated with the resource-sharing model of public clouds, and supports enterprises in enjoying the technical dividends brought by public clouds in terms of large-scale deployment, rapid delivery, and centralized operation and maintenance. Currently, major domestic public cloud service providers can offer dedicated cloud services, usually targeting large state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, group companies, or financial institutions. This is because the management overhead of the public cloud technology that dedicated clouds rely on is significant, requiring dozens of nodes (management node requirements) to start, which generally makes it challenging for ordinary users to maintain such large-scale cloud platforms.
Both of these overall technical transformation routes require not only rebuilding the infrastructure layer but also conducting application and data migrations, and there is a significant possibility that application reconstruction may be necessary.
At this stage, regardless of the solutions and products adopted for transforming virtualization applications, it is challenging to maintain complete consistency in functional characteristics and user experience with the original system. Therefore, the final decision must be made through careful evaluation, including abandoning some non-core, unnecessary functions, or achieving the same effect through application-layer and architecture-layer transformations.
Key Assessment Points for Production-Level Virtualization Solutions
Based on the aforementioned methods, different enterprises can analyze the applicability according to their specific situations, but regardless of the industry or scale of transformation, it is essential to take “meeting production-level requirements” as the core evaluation criterion for the solution: first, the core requirement of the solution is “production-level”; if the selected transformation solution cannot meet “production-level” standards in performance, reliability, security, and support, the negative impact on business will outweigh the benefits; second, the feasible path to implementation is “trade-offs”, meaning that for the “production core” related components and functions in the solution, the available alternative products and solutions must be evaluated with the strictest standards; for the non-“production core” related parts, a decision can be made to postpone transformation or lower the solution standards. The key assessment points for production-level solutions are illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Key Assessment Points for Production-Level Solutions
1. Production-Level Stability, Performance, and Real Cases
The new solution must have cases of actual deployment in production environments, as well as proven stability and performance metrics in real production. The aforementioned major IT solution providers or cloud operators’ products and systems have been widely applied in China. Enterprise users need to select the most suitable reference from among numerous solution cases based on the characteristics of their industry and the scale of their applications, thereby establishing accurate expectations for the replacement effects. Additionally, product evaluations should focus on business continuity and data reliability capabilities, as well as the actual capacity to support production business (rather than the vendor’s “nominal” performance).
2. Openness and Compatibility
For example, VMware has developed an open ecosystem, where in many scenarios, users only use vSphere as the virtualization system, while the other components come from other vendors in the VMware ecosystem, and many domestic software and hardware products are compatible and coexist with vSphere. Therefore, improving the openness and compatibility of virtualization transformation helps facilitate the rapid transition of products and solutions originally compatible with vSphere to collaborate with domestic virtualization and cloud computing platforms for mutual benefit.
3. Local Product Adaptation Status, Independent Research and Development Capability, Local Service Capability
Considering the background of “downtime” risks, the new virtualization solution must possess a high level of independent R&D capability and be adaptable to the domestic IT ecosystem, taking into account both the compatibility between existing hardware and software and the vendor’s independent R&D strength, ensuring that the product and solution’s long-term roadmap can adapt to the continuous development of the ecosystem. Furthermore, whether the chosen new solution provider has sufficient technical service capabilities and can assist end users in completing migration and stable operation and maintenance is also an important consideration. Particularly, compared to commercially mature solutions with established ecosystems, many domestic products and solutions can currently only be implemented and maintained by the original manufacturers, making the technical capabilities of the original service personnel an important influencing factor.
In summary, this article analyzes typical virtualization implementation paths and products, proposing key assessment points for constructing production-level virtualization solutions, aiming to assist domestic enterprises in selecting the virtualization transformation solutions that best fit their characteristics.
(*This article only represents the author’s personal views)
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