Virtualization is certainly one of the hottest buzzwords at the moment. And that’s no surprise when the value proposition appears so compelling: being able to do more, or at least the same as before, but with less.
Whether you are applying the concept to servers, operating systems, applications, or storage devices, virtualization seems to come from some kind of IT heaven. However, it does add a significant layer of management complexity and if you’re not careful, can quickly lead to IT hell.
Charles Babcock recently wrote in InformationWeek about some of the complexities of virtualization in the article entitled, “Virtualization Runs Into Some Potholes.” Among other things, the article describes the challenges Tony DeFelice, manager of end user software at the Pennsylvania healthcare provider WellSpan Health, faced when consolidating 15% of its 350 servers over the past 12 months:
“The software wouldn’t load on client machines unless someone with administrative privileges reset PCs to accept them. DeFelice learned the hard way that extending virtualization to more users and applications adds a layer of management complexity.”
And as Clint Boulton sums up so well in the Internetnews.com article “IBM Tabs The ‘Next Frontier“,
“While customers may be trimming their hardware deployments with virtualization software, they still have to account for the virtual servers present on physical servers. So, while clients no longer have 100 physical computers to manage, they still have 100 virtual computers to manage.”
The obvious way for organizations to reap the rewards of virtualization while avoiding the headaches is to measure a lot and manage often. Real management comes from an informed understanding of measurements, set against a sense of how values have varied over time (usually in terms of some well-defined frame of reference called a baseline). This approach permits deviations themselves to be measured, and lets management occur when and as thresholds are crossed, or when variances exceed preset values.
So despite the management complexity, the benefits of virtualization are making it compelling for many organizations. And regardless of the hype, it’s obviously here to stay. The InformationWeek article states that 79% of companies with 500 employees or more have adopted server virtualization or will within a year, according to a survey of data center managers by Sage Research.
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