The challenges of virtualisation: what it takes to succeed

There are a number of new technologies that are vying for the attention of IT managers and CIOs. However, there are only a few innovations that can actually help companies improve their top-line performance or bottom-line productivity.

Virtualisation is one of them. Virtualisation has gained a lot of traction in the recent times finding favor with small and big companies alike. It brings with it the promise of radically transforming computing for the better by reducing costs and increasing agility.

According to research firm Gartner, 48% of installed applications will run onvirtual machines by 2012.

Technology is evolving at a rapid rate, and virtualisation is no longer just about consolidation and cost savings, it is about the agility and flexibility. Some of the key benefits include having a positive impact on costs and power consumption, consolidation and scalability.

 

However, without an effective management strategy the benefits of virtualisation can be offset by the challenges of new requirements that affect key service level processes such as backup, high availability, and storage management, to name a few.

According to the India findings of the Symantec 2011 Virtualisation and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, there are gaps between expectations and reality which indicate that organisations are still learning what these technologies are capable of and how to overcome the new challenges they bring with them.

As virtualisation becomes more widespread in 2012, certain challenges would need to be tackled head on.

1) Virtualisation can reduce physical server sprawl, but it actually increases virtual server sprawl because it’s so easy and fast to provision new virtual machines. Virtual machine sprawl introduces its own set of challenges. Virtual Machine sprawl is a serious issue since it becomes difficult to detect the actual amount of storage that is being utilised—which invariably leads to wastage. The resulting uncontrolled growth in storage has a sharply negative impact on increasingly tight IT budgets.

2) Virtualisation increases management complexity, especially when there are disparate tools to manage. The network teams, server teams and storage teams need to come together and work in unison as walls between departments get eliminated. The IT staff will be presented with newer challenges at every step which need to be resolved.

3) You can no longer approach your virtual environment in a tactical and isolated way, but rather as a part of the overarching IT fabric. This means that your strategy needs to include plans for broader service-level and management factors to ensure long-term success. Companies that adopt a silo approach will be laggards in the VM adoption race. Their ROI for virtualisation will continue to decrease as operational costs of running separate environments slow the ability of organisations to convert from physical to virtual.

4) Virtualisation projects often start as a small project and eventually grow into large portions of the IT environment. In 2012, many companies will combine the VM project teams and infrastructure with corporate IT. This will highlight the need for physical and virtual assets to work together as a platform.

5) Virtualisation changes the requirements and approaches for backup and recovery, storage management, high availability, and disaster recovery. According to the India findings of the 2012 annual Symantec Disaster Recovery Study, nearly 50 per cent of data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only 10 per cent of the data and mission-critical applications in virtual environments is protected by replication.

6) The ease of deployment and workload mobility that virtualisation enables can make security, configuration management, and compliance more challenging than in less dynamic physical server environments.

The awareness around virtualisation being an enabler for private and hybrid clouds is widespread, but the important thing to bear in mind is that it is critical to plan a seamless move. This is to ensure that resultant benefits like simplicity, affordability and efficiency offered by these environments is achieved.

Enterprises will be able to successfully deploy virtualisation if they spend the time necessary up-front to discover their requirements, learn about all their options, and plan with best practices in mind.

(The author is director, technology sales (India & SAARC), Symantec)