Do You Know Your Virtual Infrastructure "Inside and Out"?

Virtualization has been around for a while, and the business case for virtualizing IT resources has been clearly established; ranging from improving performance to enhancing scalability to better system utilization.

Why, then, does the idea that virtualization can serve an as entire enterprise infrastructure remain a new concept?  This surprising result came to light from a recent survey conducted by Unisphere Research for SHARE, the world's largest association of corporate users of enterprise IT technology.

Among the survey findings was that most virtualization initiatives are scattered and few are enterprise in scope (Figure 1).  About 22% of respondents say they are adopting virtualization on an enterprise scale, but 30% say it is selected on a department-by-department basis. Another 23% aren't even aware what their corporate virtualization strategy includes. Ultimately, however, a majority of respondents view enterprise virtualization as a long-term IT strategy.

Figure 1

Based on the survey results, one way to interpret the reason for the lack enterprise-wide virtualization adoption is the inherent complexity of managing business services and application performance at a level at least equivalent to that achieved in traditional physical infrastructures.  Without that assurance - and consider how tricky it to manage physical IT resources! -- it is understandable why the majority of virtualization deployments remain siloed in individual departmental initiatives.

Knowing Your Virtual Infrastructure "Inside and Out"

Enterprise-wide virtualization deployment requires knowing how a business service is performing and which domains (network, server, VM, applications) are working and which are not.  It is no longer sufficient to just monitor the uptime or resource usage levels of virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers and believe that the entire IT infrastructure is working well.