Executive Viewpoint: Mark Linesch, HP

By Mark Linesch
published: Sunday, January 18 2009

The year 2008 was marked by the maturing of numerous virtualization technologies that allow IT departments to maximize the value of data center investments by successfully managing and automating mixed physical and virtual environments. In the current economic climate, companies that have already embarked on virtualization projects are probably thankful that they are on the path to delivering cost savings and increased server utilization - essentially, the ability to do more with less. Yet, many may not realize that the benefits of virtualization go well beyond cost savings. Virtualization also allows organizations to create a more dynamic environment where resources can be shared, optimized and quickly moved to support changing business requirements. This flexibility becomes increasingly important in a challenging economic environment.

Global research commissioned by HP in September 2008 showed that while 86 percent of technology decision makers have implemented virtualization projects, most are only in the beginning stages. Among those who have begun implementing projects, 89 percent expect to virtualize one-fourth of their technology environments by 2010. These findings are significant because they illustrate that virtualization is moving beyond specialized environments and is being utilized more broadly throughout the data center.   However, only one third of survey respondents thought of virtualization as a business tool, indicating that the the power and potential of virtualization is not broadly understood as an investment in business growth.

2009: New opportunities and challenges

Like any rapidly emerging technology, virtualization brings not only great benefits but new challenges as well.  The year 2009 will continue to bring innovations to address these challenges through new product offerings and deployment methodologies.

Virtualization's increase in popularity has also led to an increase in "virtual sprawl" - the propagation of virtual machines without proper control or management. Additionally, the number of virtualization technologies and platform continues to grow.  Most companies will technologies from multiple vendors, adding increased diversity to the data center. Diversity in the data center is nothing new, but if not addressed early on, it can generate significant complexity and introduce more risk.

The best option to reduce the risk of virtual sprawl is an integrated and heterogeneous management approach. Ideally, organizations should analyze, manage and optimize both physical and virtual resources in the same manner, using the same management tool that provides information on all available resources on a single screen. In this manner, organizations can simplify and standardize organizational processes, without actually changing them. Given the preference for organizations to maintain diverse data centers, a management tool that supports multiple operating systems and virtualization environments is critical to reducing risk.

Capacity planning: the Goldilocks question

As virtualization deployments have expanded, companies are also challenged to find new and better approaches to planning their environments. Organizations cannot put too many virtual machines on one server or performance may suffer.  But if they put too few virtual machines on each server, it can hurt the bottom line if servers will continue to be underutilized. So how do they achieve the right balance?

In 2009, the industry will see broader adoption of advanced capacity planning software that permits server administrators easily visualize the best way to consolidate and continuously optimize their environment. These tools can sort through thousands of data points about actual server utilization, including performance and energy usage information, to provide IT administrators with recommendations on the best fit for particular application workloads on physical or virtual servers.  Better capacity planning will lead to even broader virtualization adoption and increased utilization without sacrificing performance or stability.

The introduction of logical servers

An interesting turn in the data center is how virtualization is not only impacting the virtual data center, but the physical one as well. Once an organization discovers the flexibility that virtualization provides, they begin to demand the same flexibility from their physical infrastructure.  In 2008, HP introduced the concept of logical servers to deliver the flexibility associated with virtualization to both physical and virtual servers. Logical servers enable administrators to easily create best practice templates of standard server deployments. These server templates or "profiles" contain all the information needed to run the application and link to network and shared storage resources. Because these physical or virtual server profiles are stored as a file they can be easily created, copied, and moved. Administrators can now manage physical machines and virtual machines using the same management tools. It's exciting to think of how this concept can be applied in other areas of the data center, as it truly becomes more intelligent and fluid.

Automating a virtual environment

The role of automation in a virtual environment will also take on greater importance during 2009 and beyond. Because of the complexity that virtualization can also introduce, automation is gaining importance as companies need to map dependencies between physical and virtual servers, keep tabs on network and storage resources, and ensure compliance of critical IT processes.

Automation enables enterprises to more seamlessly manage their data center infrastructure in close harmony with the business services without having to throw more resources at the issue. Because change can be deployed more quickly and effectively, virtualization actually allows more simplified change management within the infrastructure that was not possible before reducing the risk of service downtime. Automation is usually introduced in stages within a data center environment and should be aligned with the core IT change management processes of an organization. Automation solutions that can manage change -- from the infrastructure through the business service -- for both physical and virtual environments are especially critical in a growing data center.

Virtualization will only continue to gain popularity as it becomes less tactical and is deployed more broadly as part of a comprehensive data center strategy. HP is continually expanding the capabilities of its Insight Software and HP Software portfolios to help companies benefit from virtualization, increasing the flexibility of their infrastructure and putting unused data center capacity to work on business priorities.

HP

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