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Page 1 of 2 Managing to Succeed By David Greschler published: Monday, July 28 2008
Virtualization has become one of the most talked-about technologies in the data center. And for good reason: It can help companies create IT systems that are not only highly efficient and cost effective, but that have the self-awareness to automatically, and almost instantly, adapt to deliver the capabilities needed as business conditions change. The idea that you can make pools of dynamic resources available to users anywhere, any time is extraordinary, and represents a sea change for the IT community.
But along with these tremendous benefits, virtualization has the potential to add much more complexity to your environment. Think of virtualization as supercharging your IT engine. Everything has more power, speed and flexibility. But with virtual machine (VM) sprawl, you may not know where your assets reside, how many you really have or how to juggle and optimize them. That's why the more you virtualize, the more indispensable management becomes.
Or, to put it another way, strong systems management capabilities are important in the physical world; in the virtual world they become essential. Without them, the benefits you gain from virtualizing will be a fraction of the potential rewards - or worse; a virtualized world that isn't well-managed can be less reliable and perhaps even more expensive than its non-virtualized counterpart.
In fact, the hypervisor itself is becoming a largely commoditized product. To discover the real distinctions between one vendor and another, you have to look at their management solutions. Do they manage both physical and virtual servers from one "dashboard?" Can they tell you what's happening all the way down to the application level?
One for All
IDC recently reported that "many enterprises and IT operations and server management teams are reaching the point of frustration - and requesting options for a single console that manages both physical and virtual infrastructures. The reality is that there is a growing disconnect between the physical layers of management and growing VM sprawl. With business pressures forcing IT organizations to become more efficient and effective, many are looking for vendors to address this missing link in heterogeneous systems management."
You may have to straddle the physical and virtual environments, but that doesn't mean you have to manage them separately. You don't want two separate management tools, two separate staff groups, two support models, and so forth. You want virtualization to seamlessly integrate with your existing processes.
That's why Microsoft developed virtualization management technology (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that provides heterogeneous support for both your physical and virtual assets, and for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft hypervisors and virtual servers.
Not Just for Servers Anymore
Of course, these days virtualization isn't just about servers; desktop virtualization has become a hot topic, too. It offers you the ability to host and centrally manage desktop virtual machines in the data center while giving end users a full PC desktop experience, almost identical to that of a standard PC, but from a thin client device or a remote location, and without having to worry about application compatibility issues.
Desktop virtualization actually comprises a number of different flavors of virtualization: There's presentation virtualization, application virtualization and the relatively new concept of virtual desktop infrastructure, in which you actually host a desktop operating system on a virtual machine running on a server in the data center.
At the desktop level, too, virtualization management has an important role to play. And here, too, you want a single dashboard that allows you to manage all these virtualized components on the server and the desktop in real time.
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