Brian Bakstran, VP of Product Marketing at our parent company, CA, recently blogged about a study from Network Instruments which talks about how 59% of IT organizations “lack the experience to manage virtualized environments effectively.”
Combined with the idea that by 2012, 80% of all new servers will be virtual ones, and you start to get this sinking feeling that the entire IT industry knows where it’s going, but hasn’t really thought about what it needs to do once it gets there… sort of like sitting in the first four rows at Sea World, all excited to see Shamu, but forgetting to pack a poncho.
And so vendors like us and our parent company offer that visibility. (In the case of CA, for right now, we’re offering it in spades, with the NetQoS stuff [PDF] and the e-Health stuff and CA Virtualization Management.)
The main concern that the lack of visibility presents to enterprise IT shops is the idea that mission critical applications that performed fine before virtualization may perform poorly when virtualized, and the IT shop will have no way of being proactive in finding performance problems, nor will they have the tools they need to quickly find the root cause of the problem.
And visibility is necessary even before virtualization to compare performance to the non-virtualized baseline. There are some applications that simply will always perform poorly in virtualization, and the sooner those applications are discovered, the better. Knowing what does and does not work in virtualized environments gives you options – you can replace the app, run the app on a dedicated server, or even recode the app to work better in virtualized environments. But without visibility, you have no options.
Between the reduction in energy consumption and the better utilization of existing servers, the benefits of virtualization are worth the risk, but there’s nothing that says that you can’t bring in everything you can to get visibility into your virtualized servers and mitigate the risk.
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