Virtualization continues to grow at 20 percent or more per year, but it is not expected to overtake existing physical architectures at least through 2010. This white paper examines the unique challenges of virtualization and offers tips for its successful management alongside IT's physical deployments.
Virtualization Sanity Check:
Stopping the Sprawl with Complete IT Visibility
A WHITE PAPERBy Tony PerriVirtualization is riding a groundswell of This has presented a formidable challenge. Because no integrated popularity. All around the world, IT organizations solution has been available, IT teams have resorted to managing physical and virtual machines separately-and the latter, with are attracted to its promise of quick deployment limited success. Remarkably, some businesses use no virtualization and cost savings. These benefits, which are management tools at all, resorting to manual report coordination nothing short of a boon in the current economy, and correlation across multiple layers of people, processes, and will continue to drive up adoption rates in coming technology. Nearly one-third of enterprises use only the management months. Nearly two-thirds of enterprise IT shops tools that come bundled with their virtualization technologies, which expects to implement virtualized servers next works better than manual management but still doesn't address 3the array of technologies in a typical virtual environment. Only 10 year. Industry analysts, equally enthusiastic, percent have third-party tools, which do well with handling the have named virtualization as the No. 1 strategic complexity of multiple virtualization platforms, technologies, and technology for 2009. vendors but still fail to manage physical and virtual environments 4All industry acclaim aside, virtualization has thrown IT managers quite simultaneously.a curveball. The promise it held for simplifying IT management has, A federated CMDB, coupled with the right monitoring agents, can tie 1in fact, produced the opposite effect. Because of virtual sprawl, IT IT's virtual and physical worlds together in a single desktop. With its decision makers are now faced with the daunting task of managing ability to connect to diverse technologies, it can gather configuration a burgeoning number of virtual machines (VMs) that are multiplying information about any IT component, including VMs, the physical faster than they can possibly monitor. Not only are IT managers being server they're stacked upon, and the business services that rely on challenged to keep track of virtually invisible components, but they them. This multilayered data provides IT managers with an expansive are also charged with managing "hard" IT assets. perception of their environment that is direct, immediate, and accurate. This hybrid environment is something IT managers will have to A complete management solution featuring a federated CMDB. live with for a while. Although virtualization continues to grow at This is the key to seeing outside the box, keeping virtual sprawl 20 percent or more per year, it is not expected to overtake existing manageable, integrating abstraction with reality, and managing the 2physical architectures at least through 2010. To effectively manage broad, entangled web that has become IT's infrastructure.both VMs and physical boxes, IT decision makers must have complete visibility into their IT landscape. They need to be able to view all VMs and their respective relationships-to physical servers, storage The Box Lives Onunits, and business services. In addition, they must have the ability Despite virtualization's rapid growth, it will not entirely replace to manage performance and handle changes in both physical and physical deployments any time soon (if at all), largely because of the virtual components, across multiple platforms. fear of the unknown. Adding yet another layer of abstraction to IT's complex environment raises the troubling question of how (or even What is Virtualization? if) VMs can be completely managed.
Pinpointing their locations is difficult enough, as VMs can be easily Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than cloned and moved. Add to this challenge the prospect of applying actual) version of IT resources, such as an operating traditional IT disciplines, such as application management; classic IT control functions; risk, governance, and service continuity; system, a server, a storage device, or network resources. and performance and availability, and the virtualization scenario It may involve building many virtual resources from one can become overwhelming. This uncertainty surrounding VM physical resource or establishing one virtual resource from management is enough to keep some o... [download for more]
