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In the computing world, a dramatic shift is taking place, enabling a new way in which IT departments manage services. The promise of a leaner, more efficient data center that provides businesses with more computing power for less money has all types of organizations clamoring to virtualize their data center—from small businesses to government agencies to large corporations. In fact, a Ziff-Davis publication reported that 70 percent of companies polled had already virtualized at the time of the study, or had plans to virtualize some time in 2008.
In the rush to virtualize, many companies have forgotten the painful and expensive lessons learned from introducing risk into the physical environment. Virtualization software makes it easier than ever for IT personnel to deploy and manage new servers and other infrastructure components.
However, these same beneficial capabilities of virtualization also permit risk to be rapidly introduced into the enterprise. To minimize exposure to risk, virtual machines must be afforded the same protection from internal and external attacks as physical machines. They must also be protected from inadvertent error, an issue exasperated by the easy deployment of machines characteristic of virtual environments. As new virtual systems are created, used and de-provisioned— all within a very short period of time—controlling and accounting for these rapidly deployed environments becomes an enormously challenging, yet critical task. Also, organizations are struggling with their ability to report on compliance of virtual infrastructure.
To ensure virtualization is a success, it is vital that IT organizations take a pragmatic approach to its risks and implement detective controls to mitigate those risks.
Andi Mann, Research Director at EMA, has stated that while virtualization brings real benefits, it can also cause some issues, especially for organizations that do not implement policy-based management tools to administer this new environment.2 The effective change and configuration management processes so vital to the physical environment have become even more critical with the virtual environment. A robust configuration audit and control solution such as Tripwire Enterprise provides the proactive configuration assessment and automated change detection throughout the virtual environment to ensure the same level of stability is maintained within a virtualized environment as it is on stand-alone systems.
Why Virtualization?
Customers embrace virtualization for a variety of reasons, although most are attracted to the cost reductions, management flexibility and efficiency touted as immediate benefits of a virtualized environment. A smaller percentage of businesses turn to virtualization to increase business resiliency—for example, to support disaster recovery and business continuity efforts. As the virtualization space matures, this latter trend is expected to grow.
Virtualization makes it easy to deploy data center systems at will, providing IT flexibility to quickly respond to the constantly changing demands of today’s business. With virtualization, administrators manage pooled resources across the enterprise, distributing resources dynamically where they’re needed, as they’re needed. Virtualization also provides developers an ideal means of creating test configurations that can be rapidly tested, destroyed and rebuilt, avoiding the time and expense of procuring and building dedicated test systems and disruption of primary production systems. Server virtualization alone offers a whole new level of availability to business-critical applications using an approach that is not only more affordable, but is also less complex to implement than traditional approaches. Businesses can extend virtualization techniques to networks, storage, operating systems, applications and laptop or server hardware, allowing them to fully leverage their infrastructure investments.
According to numerous sources, the top drivers toward virtualization are:
Underutilized hardware
With increases in computing power and reduced costs for disk storage, systems in the data center often run at only 10 to 15 percent capacity. Also, many organizations view resource pooling and aggregation as an opportunity to more effectively use their data center’s physical resources, an especially attractive opportunity given the increased costs for other aspects of the physical infrastructure like cooling.
Lack of physical space in data centers and rising energy costs
Because businesses have deployed huge numbers of servers in the past 10 years, there is simply not enough physical space to house them in data centers. Virtualized environments can deliver the same computing capacity as non-virtual environments, but reduce real estate and facilities costs because they require less rack space in the data center.
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