Virtualizing UC - Two Things You Need to Know
It is both amazing and sad to watch how the Unified Communications (UC) players are "adapting" their wares to virtualization.
The virtualization tidal wave that has swept through the data center, ushering in tantalizing cost savings and productivity benefits is now approaching the Unified Communications landscape.
The primary benefit is that customers can achieve an economy of scale by consolidating physical servers and deploying virtual servers that can share resources. This hardware flexibility means that whether your VMware environment has a hardware blade infrastructure (variable capacity) or fixed server hardware capacity; you can share your hardware infrastructure with UC and telephony as a Vapp just like any other application. In other words, deploying UC and telephony simply utilizes a portion of your hardware infrastructure resources.
So why is it that some vendors are mandating the use of hardware they make or supply? Is this the right strategy?
Brian Riggs, in his latest article "What's Next for UC and Virtualization Software in Private Clouds" in reference to hardware being agnostic says,
“In a number of cases, when UC software runs with a hypervisor, it needs to run on a specific server hardware platform. Cisco is the prime example here. When its UC Manager, Unity, Unified Presence Server, and other elements making up its UC solution run with vSphere, Cisco’s UCS servers provide the underlying hardware. Avaya and others rely on third-party server hardware, of course, since unlike Cisco they have not launched themselves into the server market. However, their telephony, messaging, and other software often resides on a specific hardware model that is delivered, sometimes even rebranded, by the UC vendor.”
Another great benefit of the power of server virtualization is the ability to use powerful data center management tools such as vSphere High Availability and vSphere Fault Tolerance to increase resiliency and business continuity and take advantage of your virtualized hardware infrastructure, VMware management applications and high-availability features to deploy UC and telephony.
Surprisingly, most UC vendors now offering virtualization don't allow you to use these virtualization management tools.
Brian Riggs comments,
"For the most part, UC vendors have not begun exploiting these advanced management features of the virtualization software they support. Mitel is a notable exception, with its PBX being able to leverage the VMware high-availability features to provide businesses with a disaster mitigation solution tied directly to the protection of other applications deployed in the data center. This will hopefully become the norm, rather than the exception going forward."
It seems to me, if you have to use a vendor’s hardware and you can't use the virtualization vendor's data center tools you are getting virtualization in name only without any of the real benefits.
Buyer beware.