Tackle the Challenges of Virtualization Management.

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Tackle the Challenges of
Virtualization ManagementTable of Contents Executive Summary .....................................................................................................................1
Benefits and Challenges ..............................................................................................................2> The Virtualization Challenge .......................................................................................................2
Evolving from Static to Dynamic Service Management .........................................................3> Service Automation - Maintain Operational Efficiency and Risk Containment .......................3> Service Support - Provide Ongoing Integrity and Support of the Virtualized Infrastructure ...4> Service Assurance - Deliver Increased Performance and High Availability .............................5
Criteria for Virtualization-Enabled Service Management Solutions ......................................5> Foundation Criteria ......................................................................................................................5> Solution Criteria ..........................................................................................................................5
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................6Executive Summary
Many IT organizations have embarked on initiatives to virtualize their enterprise infrastructures in an effort to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and reduce energy consumption. In particular, server virtualization is a significant part of any "green" IT initiative. It not only helps reduce server sprawl, but it also pro-vides the ability to quickly meet changing business and workload conditions. According to Gartner, the 1installed base of virtualized machines will surpass four million by 2009, up from just 540,000 in 2006.
To tackle the challenges of virtualization, you must do more than simply migrate services from physical to virtual assets. You must control the full lifecycle of virtualization in your data center - from planning to configuration to management - across a broad range of virtual and physical server technologies. This approach makes it possible for you to develop, implement, and maintain your virtualized environ-ment in a way that ensures high service quality and agility, without sacrificing management control or regulatory compliance.
Effective planning involves optimizing the assignment of virtual servers to physical servers. This strategy maximizes the use of physical resources while maintaining service performance and availability. The right approach to configuration involves dynamically provisioning virtual servers to physical servers without violating corporate policy or regulatory compliance. Effective management means maintaining the virtualized environment at required levels of performance and availability.
Each of these three areas - planning, configuration, and management - presents a challenge. Virtuali-zation adds a whole new level of complexity to the IT infrastructure that necessitates an evolution of service management processes and solutions. These processes and solutions must be "virtualization enabled." This means that they must be evolved not only to tolerate the virtualized environment, but also to enable IT to exploit virtualization to its full potential.
Virtualization-enabled service management processes and solutions must enable IT to manage the virtualized environment from a service perspective. This presents a particularly vexing problem because the infrastructure services are continually moving across physical resources in the infrastructure. Effective service management in this fluid environment requires answering not only the question, "Where is my server?" but also "Where is my service?" To answer these questions, you must know - at all times and for all services - which virtual resources are delivering which services, and which physical devices are hosting which virtual resources.
This paper:> Examines the advantages of virtualization and the issues that could inhibit its widespread adoption> Discusses the implications of virtualization with respect to service management processes and solutions> Describes the criteria that service manage... [download for more]