[TABLE]Like any new technology, it's easy to get carried away with the upside of virtualization. The benefits are both substantial and attainable with a little work. The research I have done with Enterprise Management Associates shows that real and measurable ROI is almost universal. Almost every enterprise is achieving multiple goals (on average around five, and for some organizations up to 10 or more) in areas like consolidation, provisioning, disaster recovery (DR), security and compliance, etc. So it's easy to look only at the benefits of virtualization technology and ignore the need for virtual system management (VSM). In this tip, I will explore the need for virtual system management and why enterprises should make it a priority in their environments.
The importance of virtual system management
When I refer to VSM, I am talking about the combination of disciplines required to manage the entire virtualized system – not just virtual machine (VM) or hypervisor management. VSM encompasses traditional systems management disciplines such as provisioning, performance management, patch management, capacity planning, backup and recovery, configuration management, process automation, and more. It also includes new disciplines such as VM management, hypervisor management, live migration and virtual image management.
Some of the problems that occur when virtualization is deployed without adequate virtual system management include:
Using virtual systems management to improve your infrastructure
Even a single unmanaged VM deployment can have real consequences. For example, an IT Director I talked to earlier this year described a situation where a system administrato
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r accidentally deployed a new VM – with an active Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server – into their production network, instead of the test network where he intended it to be.
As a result, workstations in the call center started to have networking problems and call center operators were unable to access their networked customer service application. The problem was detected only after users had logged multiple problem reports; and only fixed after a laborious troubleshooting exercise involving multiple IT departments.
One or more virtual systems management controls could have prevented this. For example:
Summary
This is just one real-world example of the problems that poor management can cause and some examples of how adequate virtual system management could have prevented it. Indeed, the number of problems poor VSM can create and the number of ways good VSM can help are far more than I could possibly list in a short article.
Make no mistake though. Without applying virtual system management protocols to your virtualization deployments, you are setting yourself up for higher costs, lower productivity, reduced performance, increased downtime, higher risk, and many other major problems.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andi Mann is a Research Director with the IT analyst firm ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™). Andi has over 20 years of IT experience in both technical and management roles, working with enterprise systems and software on mainframes, midrange, servers, and desktops. Andi leads the EMA Systems Management research practice, with a personal focus on data center automation and virtualization. For more information, visit the EMA website
