Reap the Benefits of Multiple Hypervisors

Corporate mergers, acquisitions, application-specific requirements and single vendor lock-in concerns have caused many organizations to use multiple hypervisor environments. Adopting more than one platform has both cost benefits and infrastructure challenges. You must carefully balance both to determine if a multiple hypervisor environment is the right deployment option for you.

Organizations adopting multiple hypervisors want to accomplish three things:

• Control costs by having different resource tiers within their data centers.
• Drive virtualization into areas where they haven’t been able to before, such as remote and branch offices.
• Build more cost-effective disaster recovery solutions.

From an IT point of view, hypervisor diversification is about the following attributes:

• Resilience — Monocultures come with inherent risks. One software bug or security flaw can make organizations vulnerable. Having multiple virtualization platforms can reduce this risk.
• Flexibility — Having a multiple hypervisor strategy in place gives IT the flexibility to deal with resource tiering, remote and branch offices and disaster recovery.

While benefits of using multiple hypervisors are evident, you must also consider the changes it can bring to the requirements and priorities of your data center operations. Hypervisors are the foundation for private cloud, a fundamental re-engineering of the data center that transforms IT into a service. Bringing in a second hypervisor requires reintegrating, certifying and testing of that complete virtualization environment. Adopting multiple hypervisors requires you to:

• Make multiple hypervisor support a key requirement when purchasing hardware and software.
• Invest in management and software tools that can reduce the complexity of managing a diverse environment.
• Get effective migration tools that are essential in preventing siloing and virtual machines (VMs) from becoming trapped in a tier.
• Test migration from hypervisor to hypervisor to ensure each will work under various scenarios, such as disaster recovery failover.