Virtualisation holds great promises for the data centre – providing better quality of service, improved availability and business continuity; being able to mobilise and deploy resources much more quickly, and; reducing energy consumption. Delivering these benefits while cutting costs can make you a hero. But delivering these benefits requires a strategic view of virtualisation in the data centre, integrating infrastructure, applications and service management from a business service management perspective.
Recent research publications show two major changes underway for virtualisation. First, customers expect even more business outcomes and IT benefits from virtualisation than they did in the past. These now not only include efficiency and cost savings, but agility and flexibility, availability and business continuity, and more.(1) Second, they’re driving virtualisation pervasively throughout the data centre rather than deploying specific applications and projects.(2) In fact, for an increasing number of businesses, all new deployments are, by default, in a virtualised environment, unless there is a clearly substantiated reason for not virtualising. And that means thinking of virtualisation as a strategy, not as a project.
Here are five challenges you’ll should address to realise the maximum value and benefit of pervasive virtualisation.
1. Think of virtualisation as transformational
Effectively permeating virtualisation throughout the data centre requires an ongoing focus on standardisation and simplification of the infrastructure itself. This is facilitated by ongoing consolidation endeavours complemented by application modernisation initiatives, to maximise its utility and value.
2. Management is key
Your data centre will be even more heterogeneous, not less. You’re likely to have hypervisors from multiple suppliers. And even after consolidation, you’re likely to still run a significant number of applications directly on physical infrastructure of different types and sizes (blades, rack mount, etc.). Your infrastructure management tools need to not only help manage this heterogeneous physical infrastructure, but also your heterogeneous virtual infrastructure.
3. Business services are of the utmost importance
Look at your IT resources from a business services perspective. This has implications for any objectives you have regarding business continuity, operational availability, and service management. IT governance and service level agreements must apply to the virtual environment as well as the physical. This will help you address a common challenge: virtual server sprawl.
4. Automate for greater insight and control
Infrastructure management tools must monitor and control the environment from a capacity-planning perspective. Make sure that applications and business services have the resources they need, both to address current load and conditions, and to handle changing business conditions, demand and loads over time. The more you can automate this insight and control loop, the more responsive you’ll be.
5.Treat virtual resources as physical resources
Finally, virtualised resources must be treated as physical resources from a business service management perspective. Your virtual resources and assets must be visible for analysis, management and control purposes. If they are not, you cannot address issues when needed. You also cannot do root-cause analysis to check that quality of service is being maintained, and that governance is being applied properly.
(1) Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2008-2012 Forecast, IDC, John Humphreys, May 2008. IDC #212142
(2) Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts, and Recommendations. An Enterprise Management Associates Research Report, April 2008.
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