What’s virtualization without management? Difficult, survey says

Reflex Systems survey shows that enterprise IT managers continue to face challenges managing virtual environments.

Virtualization has its benefits, but enterprise IT managers admit without being able to adequately manage virtual environments, those advantages can be more difficult to achieve.

Reflex Systems this week at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco released the results of a survey of 300 enterprise IT managers. The data showed that many of those polled experienced challenges when approaching traditional IT management practices in the virtual realm. And perhaps part of the reason lies in the fact that many say they have already virtualized or plan to virtualize more of their environment by year-end.

For instance, more than half of the respondents said “at least half of their business critical applications will be virtualized by the end of this year,” according to a Reflex Systems press release. That figure represents a 17% increase from current utilization, the virtual systems management and security vendor reports. Survey respondents said in addition to hypervisors they also plan to invest in virtual storage and virtual management tools in the next six months. Among the reasons cited for investing in additional management tools (above and beyond those provided by the hypervisor vendors) were performance, security and auditing/reporting, Reflex Systems reports.

“IT shops are also staggering under the burden of managing an increasing number of virtual machines across a growing number of applications,” according to the Reflex Systems press release. “Enterprises most frequently cited capacity planning, performance and troubleshooting in the virtual environment as the top three tasks consuming the most significant resources as they continue to leverage virtualization and begin to have to deal with ‘virtualization sprawl.’”

More than one-third of enterprise IT managers ranked network visibility (flow traffic, monitoring and usage) as the top capability they are looking for in their virtualization management products. Other features such as access control and audit of users actions within the systems also ranked highly among respondents because such features “would help them manage their growing virtual infrastructure,” according to Reflex Systems.

“Virtualization promises to simplify and reduce costs, but the reality is that the virtual computing paradigm requires a new set of skills and technologies to manage it,” said Pete Privateer, CEO of Reflex Systems, in a statement. “While organizations continue to rapidly adopt virtualization to reduce costs and improve performance, they should consider implementing management tools as early as possible in the lifecycle of their virtualization deployments, to help them maximize the cost and time-saving benefits they can achieve throughout their environment.”

Does managing your virtual environment pose challenges to you? What steps have you taken to evolve your approach to management to address the virtual environment? Did VMworld 2010 provide any insight into how to better manage your virtual infrastructure? Please leave a comment here or let me know directly via e-mail at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

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