Configure with Extreme Prejudice: How to Ensure Virtualization ROI through Enhanced Management

Today there are several driving forces creating new opportunities for enhanced management and automation in virtual data centers. The vital need to increase internal responsiveness, meet rigorous compliance requirements and ensure virtualization continues to deliver on its cost-cutting promise is driving IT to look at configuration management and automation processes and tools for their virtual data centers.

The Face of a VI Admin/Engineer

VI engineers or administrators have typically come from a Windows environment and are pushing virtualization. They like to create new virtual environments that solve business issues and to be the hero, yet they aren't necessarily interested in managing these environments. For purposes of this article, we will call virtualization engineers and admins, the average Joe. Joe has been riding the virtualization wave since approximately 2006, consolidating servers and reducing costs for his company. In fact, he's flaunted his ability to save his organization hundreds to millions of dollars in server and licensing costs by consolidating servers with virtualization. What Joe isn't telling management is that he has no idea how the 5,000 VMs in his data center are configured or why several went down last week.

The Facts and What Studies Show

According to a recent Forrester survey of 164 virtualization professionals in medium to large sized organizations, many see lack of virtualization management tools as a barrier to more extensive virtualization deployments. 64% of respondents cited that they'd like to run more VMs per server. 57% of respondents expressed significant concern that application failures in one VM could affect other VMs in the future and that their top issues with managing virtual environments included being able to prevent critical events from affecting performance or availability. Despite IT's efforts, problems inevitably occur - which is why respondents also cited that diagnosing problems ranked close in importance to preventing them in the first place. Bottom line, Joe doesn't want to have fingers pointed at him for issues that arise in the virtualized data center.

How Does Virtualization Impact Configuration Management