Virtual Infrastructure Management

Written by Stephen Elliot

With its ability to reduce costs and optimize the IT infrastructure by abstracting resources, virtualization has become an increasingly popular tactic for enterprises having to compete in an ever more challenging global economy. According to a recent study CA conducted with 300 CIOs and top IT executives, 64 percent of respondents say they've already invested in virtualization, and the other 36 percent reported that they plan to invest in virtualization.

You don't have to look very hard to find the biggest reasons for virtualization's widespread adoption: cost savings and IT agility improvements. Because of the current global economic crisis, CIOs are being asked not only to do more with less, but also to do it with lower headcount while delivering higher IT service levels. By wringing out more performance without adding huge IT infrastructure line items to the budget, virtualization provides the more-bang-for-less-buck solution that organizations are looking for. Increasingly, enterprise IT organizations want to host more critical workloads on virtual machines; however the management risks must be reduced.

Respondents to CA's study stated they are also implementing virtualization for technical reasons like easier provisioning and software deployment. But although virtualization brings a tremendous opportunity for IT organizations to compress the processes and cycle times between production and application development teams, drive out more agility in the infrastructure and automate more processes, it brings a lot of complexity to the expertise needed to run the software and the management processes that must be tweaked and adjusted.

The Challenges Facing Virtual Infrastructure Management

One major technical issue facing organizations looking to add virtualization to their IT infrastructure is the limitations of system platform tools. As the virtual machine count begins to creep up, platform tools can't provide the amount of granular performance data necessary to give the IT staff a complete picture of what's going on.

Couple that with the heterogeneous mix of virtualization platforms companies are using and management challenges begin to have an impact on IT's ability to accelerate the deployment of virtual machines. The bottom line is that both platform management and enterprise management solutions are required to deliver an integrated business service view of both physical and virtual environments.

Similarly, organizations need the ability to integrate the physical infrastructure with its virtual counterpart in order to automate configuration changes, patch management, server provisioning and resource allocation. The key business service outcomes of this are lower operations costs, improved ROI from virtualization deployments, and an end-to-end view of an IT service.
CIOs are also looking at virtualization for more than just cost savings. They're looking for a management solution that will transform their IT organizations and demonstrate success via measurable metrics and key performance indicators, whether they're business processes such as inventory churn and increasing margins, or technical metrics like server-to-admin ratio (or virtual-machine-to-admin ratios), or even a reduction in the number of trouble tickets sent to the service desk. The goal is to deliver business transformation in an ongoing, measurable manner to mitigate the business risk of a growing virtualization deployment.

The Solution: Virtualization as Strategy, Not Just Tactic

All of these challenges point to a common solution that transforms the deployment of virtualization from being an ad hoc cost-savings tactic to a more strategic enterprise platform. Rather than merely increasing the number of virtual machines, IT can take the opportunity to think about how it can get the most out of decompressing the processes between teams, increasing the workflow automation, reducing handoff times, reducing configuration check times and increasing compliance. These are the foundational steps that lead to IT transformation and successful business service outcomes. Without these capabilities, the failure rate of projects and associated costs substantially increase.

Where Virtual Infrastructure Management Is Headed

Another reason that viewing virtualization as an enterprise platform is becoming crucial to organizations is that virtual machines are taking on different forms as virtual technology transforms. The management of desktop virtualization is becoming increasingly important as the technology increases in popularity. One particular challenge is the number of different architectures that needs to be taken into consideration for any desktop virtualization solution.

Likewise, a growing number of organizations are investigating network virtualization. In particular, Cisco's new virtual switch technology, which includes embedded software from VMware, has been making ripples across the IT world.

Having an enterprise platform in place makes such new developments in virtualization easier to implement and manage. The better an organization plans for the management, processes and chargeback opportunities virtualization offers, the more IT can lead the business outcome discussion and drive out measurable success.

While virtualization has already helped transform data centers, drive consolidation efforts and reduce power and cooling costs, we've just scratched the surface. There's a lot more to go.