The Impractical Reality of Deploying Virtualization in Real World Environments

Overview

Virtualization is nearly at the top of every large enterprise's key IT initiatives list. Whether to increase server utilization, promote green data center practices or for countless other reasons, upper management within most corporate environments, continue to drive the requirement for virtualization down through the organization as well as externally to individual solution vendors. In fact, the demand is so high that for applications not targeted for migration to a virtual environment, administrators and vendors alike are responsible for providing formal justification for why this is the case.

For the business-critical messaging infrastructure, despite the continued growth in adoption of virtualization within large enterprises, there remain several challenges inhibiting full migration to a virtualized environment. As new management tools, processes and procedures, and product functionalities develop, the practicality of such a migration is likely to change, but at present, still suffer from operational and technical limitations. 

In working with several enterprise clients over the years to explore virtualization as a potential deployment option, I've witnessed proven success in deploying much of the messaging infrastructure in a virtual environment, but see the true exponential growth of this model as something yet to be realized. 

Operational Challenges

Maintaining High Service-Level-Agreements (SLAs)

Business-critical applications such as email are strictly measured by their service level agreements (SLAs), which set extremely high standards for reliability, availability and recovery. Previously, much of the ownership and responsibility for these requirements was placed on the appliance and application vendors to prove both fault tolerance and disaster recovery within their solutions.  Introducing virtualization as a new platform for these applications raises the complexity both in terms of the increased disaster scenarios and points of failures, but also in the operations and coordination if and when such a failure might occur. The truth in many organizations is that this workflow, process and failure analysis has yet to be conducted. Until this is fully defined, implemented and matured within enterprises, the achievement of such high SLAs for business-critical applications has yet to be proven. As a result, most business critical applications are not among the initial target list for deployment in a virtual environment.

Recoverability & Problem Management