Virtualization's Impact on IT Operations - Part Three

By Kevin Lees
published: Friday, August 29 2008

In the previous article in this series, I addressed what I believe are some of the key Service Level Management challenges presented by virtualization to IT Operations and the tools available to address them. In this article, I’ll look at some key IT Operations’ challenges posed by virtualization from a process perspective.

In my mind, Service Level Management should be the central focus of IT Operations. Not just in the narrow sense of managing Service Level Agreements, but also in the broader sense of providing a level of IT service to a customer. Everything IT Operations does it does for somebody; whether that somebody is the external customer of an ASP or ISP, or an internal customer such as a business unit. Whether it’s Disaster Recovery or providing highly available computing resources for a critical company application, a level of service is being provided to a customer of IT Operations somewhere.

I believe it’s safe to say it has been recognized for some time now, that achieving some degree of maturity in delivering an acceptable level of services requires IT Operations to do more than simply deploy a set of datacenter management applications. Such management applications are valuable tools, but tools alone will not allow IT Operations to move beyond an ad hoc or, at most, repeatable level of maturity (as defined by CMMI for instance). To move up the maturity ladder, IT Operations must institute a set of defined, manageable and controllable processes. I believe this need becomes even more pronounced with virtualization.

Admittedly, defining and implementing processes can be one of the biggest challenges faced by IT Operations, but the payoff is worth taking on the challenge. Fortunately, there are frameworks and accepted approaches available in the market. When defining IT Operations’ processes, my preferred framework / approach is that defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL has been accepted and used in Europe for some time now and has been gaining traction in the US over the last several years. Briefly, ITIL defines and elaborates a set of processes for the following functions: Service Desk Management, Problem Management, Incident Management, Change Management, Configuration Management, Release Management, Availability Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity Management, Service Level Management, and IT Financial Management. Please note that these were the functions defined in ITIL Version 2 and are still how I tend to organize my thoughts about IT Operations’ functions. ITIL Version 3 was released within the last year or so and expanded the functions and processes it defines, putting more of an emphasis on an IT Server Lifecycle. For more information about ITIL you might want to visit www.itil-officialsite.com. Another great site for ITIL-related information, as well as general IT Service Management information is www.itsmfi.org.

Several aspects of virtualization present service level management challenges that may necessitate adapting your existing IT Operations’ processes to address or, in the absence thereof, implementing processes to address. These challenges include: the added layer of complexity presented by virtualization, the increasingly dynamic nature of virtual machine movement, virtualization’s impact on resources, and the ease with which virtual machines can be created and deployed. In the following, I will focus on six of the areas defined by ITIL that I believe are particularly important to an organization facing these challenges: Change Management, Configuration Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management, Incident Management and Problem Management. This is not to say that the other functional areas aren’t important to virtualization; obviously IT Service Continuity Management can be greatly affected by virtualization, but these six, in my opinion, can “make or break” a successful virtualization implementation in a production environment.