Uniting the Worlds of Data and Voice

Adding Unified Communications to the Virtual Data Center FEBRUARY 2010 A Mitel and VMware White Paper

UNITING THE WORLDS OF DATA AND VOICE

Table of Contents
A tale of two technologies..............................................................................2
Two worlds to manage ........................................................................................................2 When two become one........................................................................................................2 Virtualization and the data center .......................................................................................3 The world of unified communications..................................................................................5 Never the twain shall meet?................................................................................................6

Uniting the two the virtual voice breakthrough ..........................................7

How it happened .................................................................................................................7 What it means for business .................................................................................................9

How it works .................................................................................................10

Virtual Mitel Communications Director..............................................................................10 VMware vSphere 4 ............................................................................................................11 What it looks like a typical scenario ...............................................................................12

Welcome to the virtualized voice revolution ................................................14 About Mitel ...................................................................................................15 About VMware...............................................................................................15

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A tale of two technologies

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other IT managers straddle two worlds not because they want to, but because they have to. First, there is the world of the data center. Its servers and other hardware components, and the business applications that run on them, are the backbone of the organization. They turn the reams of data that companies generate and collect into the information they need to understand and operate the business. Then, there is the world of telephony. Here, voice applications ensure that the people whose performance determines how well the organization does, how effectively it competes, and whether it succeeds or fails, communicate with one another in myriad ways to ensure that information is understood and acted on. Even in todays high-tech world, voice communication is the beating heart of the business.

Two worlds to manage

Managing those worlds is not easy. It means having two of everything. Two budgets. Two groups of personnel with different sets of specialized skills. And two technology infrastructures to buy, deploy, and support. It has to be that way though, because data applications and voice applications have very different needs when it comes to the hardware they run on and the ways in which they can be managed. At least, they did until now. This paper explains how the worlds of data and voice have evolved separately in recent years, and what has kept them apart for so long. But it goes on to describe how a leader in the world of data center technology, and another in the world of telephony, got together to do something that many thought impossible to join the worlds of data and voice on a single virtualized infrastructure.

When two become one

The result is revolutionary. Its exciting. And it offers substantial benefits to organizations in the form of capital and operational cost savings, lower cost of ownership for hardware infrastructures, reduced risk associated with operational continuity and disaster recovery, and new opportunities for innovation. Its something that everyone wants. It has the power to change business. And its here now.

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Virtualization and the data center

Figure 1: Data Center Virtualization

Data center virtualization offers improved performance and more comprehensive management capabilities for data centers.

The first world and the first component of the unified voice and data solution is the data center. Its been around since the days of mainframe computers. These were huge and expensive, and organizations had to use every ounce of power they offered and squeeze every bit of potential out of them. One impediment to realizing their potential was that different software applications can require different operating systems. Unless a way could be found to run more than one operating system on a mainframe, different computers would be needed to run different software something too expensive to be practical. The solution to the problem was called virtualization. Dividing a mainframe into partitions capable of running different operating systems and applications in other words, turning one real computer into two or more virtual computers made it possible to slice and dice resources and put the pieces to their best use.

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Enter the PC

The 1980s and 90s saw the emergence of personal computers (PCs) small but powerful desktops with x86 chip architectures. These evolved rapidly. And they were inexpensive enough that data centers abandoned the mainframe and, in the process, virtualization to use PCs as servers. Other PCs were their clients. This client-server approach to hardware and software resulted in the proliferation of server farms and their clients. The new infrastructure worked well, but it too faced challenges. Typically, only a very small portion of each servers capacity was used some estimates are as low as five percent. The costs incurred to house, deploy, run, and support growing server farms became onerous. With so many components, failover and disaster protection became problematic. And managing and securing all those moving parts became complex, time-consuming, and expensive. In a sense, things were right back where they had been with mainframes. Something had to be done.
Virtualization, take two

That something was a second wave of virtualization. Just before the turn of the century, a company called VMware figured out how to virtualize personal computers. As it had with the mainframe, virtualizing server-based data centers solved the problems that CIOs faced in the client-server environment. Turning physical machines into virtual ones this time on servers rather than mainframes meant that different operating systems and applications could once again run on the same piece of hardware. Fewer resources were needed, reducing costs. Today, fourth-generation virtualization technology makes is possible for an IT professional to manage farms of servers and clients from a single console. Virtual computers can be created and modified at will. Applications and databases can be moved from one virtual machine to another without disrupting the work of the business people who depend on them. Deploying new software and maintaining hardware has become much easier, and the cost of running data centers has decreased significantly. Virtualized data centers deliver huge cost savings and operational advantages to todays organizations.

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The world of unified communications

Figure 2: Mitel Business Communications Leadership Developing the Future

When the people who ran the mainframe computers that started it all needed to talk to someone in another office or city, they picked up a telephone. It was heavy, somewhat awkward, and came with no extras, but it did the basic job. But just as the data center world has evolved since the era of the mainframe, communications technology has evolved through a series of exciting changes into the unified voice communications of today.
A parallel evolution

First came the transition from Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP made it possible to run voice applications over the Internet, and to centralize many of the maintenance tasks associated with keeping a voice infrastructure running. It also enabled unified messaging capabilities, such as the integration of voice mail and email. Further developments included the ability to use open operating systems, like Linux, and industrystandard servers from Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and others in voice infrastructures. Control of voice technology became software-based, with products like Mitel Communications Director (MCD), Mitel Applications Suite (MAS), and Mitel Border Gateway (MBG), making voice a part of the software application layer in the business data center. Just as the evolution of the data center has led to the sophisticated data infrastructures of today, so the advances in telephony have enabled the reliable, flexible, capability rich, Internet-based telephony systems that today enable teleconferencing, web and audio conferencing, centralized global call center operation, and other technologies that organizations depend on to keep communication flowing.

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Never the twain shall meet?

Virtualized data centers and telephony technologies have both come a long way, and both are critical to the day-to-day operations of 21st-century organizations. Yet they continue to exist in two separate worlds, where they are supported by separate infrastructures, largely because of something called latency.
The problem of latency

When someone initiates an action in a virtualized data center sending an email, for example there is a time lag, or latency period, before the action is completed. The virtual data center has to determine which of the available resources should be used to process the command it has received in this case, to deliver the email and then put those resources to work. This might only take seconds, but there is a latency period nonetheless. When latency happens with email and other data, its usually not a big deal. We dont expect a senders message to arrive instantaneously. Back-and-forth communication over time is the norm for email. And, although it might not even be noticed by users, it is the norm for other data center applications too. With voice, its a different story. Voice and other real-time applications dont work well in an environment with latency. Insert the time needed to deliver an email into a telephone conversation, and the conversation would quickly come to a halt. Because voice and other real-time applications havent been able to tolerate latency, they havent been suitable for virtualization. Virtualization solutions used in data centers havent been able to accommodate them. Attempts have been made to overcome the latency problem with voice applications, but until recently no workable solution could be found. Whenever it seemed that latency had been addressed successfully in the lab, real-time applications took such a hit in performance when scaled up, that the solution was not practical. Whats more, voice quality levels that were all right for demonstrations didnt cut it in the real world. The virtual data center and unified communications were still worlds apart. CIOs still had two technology infrastructures to buy, deploy, and support, and businesses still had to absorb the costs that went along with that.

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Uniting the two the virtual voice breakthrough

Thanks to the combined efforts of a leader in the field of virtualization, and another leader in the world of telecommunications, that has now changed.

Figure 3: Mitel Virtual Solutions

How it happened
VMware, the company that introduced data center virtualization in the first place and still commands a whopping 85 percent market share, and telecommunications innovator Mitel, a leader in Voice over IP solutions around the world, joined forces to confront the latency problem and related issues head on. After almost two years of intensive research and development effort in VMware and Mitel laboratories, they overcame latency and related challenges with a breakthrough solution that means the worlds of the virtual data center and unified communications can now become one in fact, already have become one in some organizations. Doing it wasnt easy it meant developing new processes and technologies on both the data center and communications fronts, and making sure they would work together seamlessly to solve the problem.

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The server side VMware vSphere 4

With input from Mitel, and by leveraging its own longstanding history of excellence and innovation in virtualization, VMware modified its market-leading virtualization technology to address the latency issue from its side. VMware enhanced its technology to address issues in the areas of scalability, resource management and processor scheduling, hardware-assisted memory virtualization, data storage, networking, resource management, and performance. The result is the VMware fourth-generation virtualization solution VMware vSphere 4, which, for the first time, can accommodate real-time applications in a data center.
The voice side Mitel Unified Communications

At the same time, Mitel leveraged its heritage of innovation in the VoIP world to enhance Mitel Unified Communications (UC) solutions and related technologies, addressing real-time application issues from the voice side of things. The result was Mitel Virtual Solutions, which provides all of the features of Mitels industryleading unified communications technologies on a virtualized infrastructure.
A third component a new chipset

A third component that helped with the solution was the Intel Xeon Nehalem chipset. As successor to the Core microchip architecture, the Nehalems focus on power and performance provided the architecture needed to make the Mitel and VMware solution viable from a performance perspective.
The results

Together, VMware vSphere 4 and Mitel Virtual Solutions have overcome the problems of uniting data and voice on a single virtual infrastructure. Unlike other solutions that leverage virtualization to enable their own products to run in integrated, single-server suites of applications, Mitel Virtual Solutions virtualizes communications to fit seamlessly into virtualized business data centers, alongside other business applications and in the context of established business processes. It is not a closed environment. Organizations that run data centers using VMware software, and voice applications using Mitel Virtual software, can now run both on a single virtualized infrastructure, reaping all of the benefits that go along with that.

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What it means for business

Those benefits are considerable. Reducing the overall number of physical servers in a data center has the obvious benefits of capital cost savings. And server consolidation also leads to immediate operational savings, because less real estate is needed to house hardware, and less energy is needed to power and cool the fewer servers that do the job. IT managers used to laboring over two plans for business continuity and disaster recovery one for data, the other for voice can now encompass their entire IT infrastructure with a single plan. And they can have a common set of service level agreements (SLAs), processes, and tools for their single infrastructure. A single standard for managing servers and applications in the data center provides increased efficiencies in a range of other IT areas, too, including provisioning for test, development, and production environments. As well as lowering the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure, virtualizing voice along with all of an organizations other business applications greatly improves ITs ability to respond to business changes, so they are better prepared to respond to the ever-shifting demands that the business places on both data and voice resources. In short, CIOs can now fundamentally change the way they think about their IT infrastructures and their resources. Instead of managing individual boxes, they can manage overall IT services. Instead of devoting most of their budgets to maintenance, they can focus on innovation. Resources and personnel that have traditionally been devoted to maintaining two infrastructures can now be focused on developing new applications and services that build competitive advantage for the organization. And, for the business people who depend on data and voice applications, it means a better quality of service at considerably less cost.

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Uniting data and voice benefits for the business

Uniting the worlds of data and voice on a single infrastructure using VMware vSphere 4 and Mitel Virtual Solutions means: Reduced capital expenditures. Running telephony and data applications on the same servers means fewer servers are needed, so the total cost of ownership for the information infrastructure drops dramatically. Reduced operations and maintenance costs. Managing communication solutions along with other virtualized business applications does away with the costs of duplicate maintenance tasks. Reduced power consumption. The power savings inherent in virtual data environments can also be applied to voice applications. Improved application availability. Applications are no longer subject to prolonged downtime for physical server maintenance. Integrated business continuity. Consolidated disaster recovery management means that management methodologies and best practices can be applied consistently across all applications in the data center, including business communication applications. Faster system deployment. Because Mitel Virtual Solutions installs easily into an existing virtualized data center, increasing communications capacity and adjusting overall workload is faster than with traditional appliances or dedicated servers. Increased business innovation. Freed from having to maintain two separate infrastructures, IT can devote resources to developing new applications and services that build competitive advantage.

How it works
Mitel Virtual Solutions integrate seamlessly into existing Mitel Communications Director (MCD) networks. And they leverage the same software licensing as the traditional Mitel solution, so that investments already made in Mitel technology are fully protected. For Mitel and VMware customers, moving to virtualized voice simply means updating their Mitel and VMware software. The features and benefits they depend on to run both their data and voice applications function as they do now, but on one infrastructure instead of two.

Virtual Mitel Communications Director

Mitels contribution to the unified solution, Virtual Mitel Communications Director (Virtual MCD), leverages the same software as the traditional MCD. It provides the same features and functions already enjoyed on traditional platforms. This includes the full breadth of IP telephony features, dynamic extension, clustering capabilities, resiliency support, SIP service provider interconnection, and embedded systems management. Virtual MCD integrates seamlessly in a network of MCDs, and with the same Mitel desk phone portfolio and applications. Virtual MCD does not have the specialized interfaces needed to support connections such as digital trunks, analog trunks, station lines, and Mitel-specific peripherals. Instead, it connects to other controllers via IP trunking or SIP trunks. Messaging solutions can be provided via offboard products, such as the Mitel Applications Suite, including Mitel NuPoint Unified Messaging (UM).

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VMware vSphere 4
The same rich set of virtual infrastructure management capabilities of VMware vSphere 4 that VMware customers are used to applying to their business applications, can now also be used with Virtual MCD applications. VMware vSphere, with the scalable and extensible management platform for VMware vSphere deployments, and the VMware vCenter Suite provide IT managers with everything they need to manage a unified infrastructure, including virtual machine creation and configuration, health monitoring, performance reports, and more. It includes: VMware VMotion. The foundation technology for several key VM management functions, vMotion enables live migration of virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime. VMware High Availability (HA). Automatically detects physical server failure and restarts virtual machines on alternate servers. VMware Fault Tolerance (FT). Enables zero downtime, zero data loss, and continuous availability against physical server failures with stateful failover protection. VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Enables automated and notified migration of virtual machines, balancing workloads to meet business demands and enabling optimal use of physical server resources. VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). Consolidates unneeded or lightly used virtual machine workloads onto fewer physical servers, placing unneeded physical servers in standby mode. As workloads increase, it brings servers back online and redistributes virtual machine workloads appropriately. Update Manager Server and OS Patching. Automatically patches / updates one or more VMware vSphere physical servers, as well as select Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems in a managed fashion. Virtual machines are migrated VMotioned off of hosts to be patched. VMware VMSafe. An integrated infrastructure that enables VM-aware security solutions from leading third-party security software vendors to be applied and used within a virtual infrastructure. VMware Site Recovery Manager. A plug-in to the VMware vCenter, it enables pre-planned disaster recovery management policies to be enacted should a primary data center or server cluster be put out of service. An entire virtual cluster can be recreated on a backup data center. Storage replication ensures data continuity. The Virtual Mitel Communications Director solution can be managed from either a VMware vSphere Client or from VMware vCenter.

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What it looks like a typical scenario

The configuration of the Virtual Mitel Communications Director solution will, of course, vary with an organizations requirements, resources, and approach to ensuring business continuity. But, for description purposes, a typical scenario can be imagined.
Deployment Configuration

Figure 4: A Typical Mitel Virtual Solutions Configuration

In a typical deployment, the virtual infrastructure hosts: one or more instances of the Virtual Mitel Communications Director, which can be configured as a cluster with resilient IP telephony failover additional Mitel business communication applications that are VMware Ready, such as Mitel Contact Center Solutions, Mitel Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced, and Mitel Enterprise Manager other business applications Mitel Applications Suite is typically deployed on its own dedicated server, and houses a complete suite of business communication applications, including messaging and audio and web conferencing. A Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) Media Gateway can be optionally deployed to provide digital and analog services, including E1 / T1 service provider interconnect for digital services. A Mitel Border Gateway is deployed on its own dedicated server in the organizations DMZ to provide secure integration for Teleworker Solution, SIP Trunk Proxy services, and the Application Web Proxy for Mitel applications.

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Business Continuity and Failover

Figure 5: Mitel Virtual Solutions Configured to Ensure Business Continuity

As Mitel continues to expand its support for virtualized data and voice centers, increasingly broad business continuity capabilities will become possible, allowing for the replication of business communication applications in secondary data centers. This type of business continuity infrastructure, enabled by VMware virtual infrastructure management coupled with Mitels application layer resiliency / failover for MCD, provide unprecedented availability in conjunction with consistent administration and manageability across the IT data center.

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Welcome to the virtualized voice revolution

Figure 6: Mitel Business Communications Leadership Developing the Future

Thanks to the results of the Mitel and VMware collaboration, CIOs and other IT managers can now unite their business data and voice applications on a single infrastructure. All of the benefits of the data center and VoIP telephony can be realized with less capital spending, lower operational and maintenance costs, reduced power consumption, and easier and more dependable business continuity and disaster recovery. What used to exist in two different worlds can now, for the first time, be united in one. Welcome to the virtualized voice revolution.

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About Mitel
Mitel delivers flexibility and simplicity in smart unified communications solutions and applications for organizations of all sizes. Combined with a full range of managed services that include voice and data network design and traffic provisioning, custom application development, and attractive financing options, Mitel is reinventing how successful organizations gain competitive advantage by easily collaborating and communicating over distance and time with customers, colleagues, and partners. Mitels (www.mitel.com) US headquarters are in Phoenix, Arizona. Global headquarters are in Ottawa, Canada, with offices, partners, and resellers worldwide.

About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform VMware vSphere customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security, and go green. With 2009 revenues of $2 billion, more than 170,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization, which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

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