Today market adoption for virtualization is growing in all segments, fueled primarily by the success of VMware.  Despite this growth we hear many IT customers say that virtual machines are great for development, but distrust for its use in production lingers.  There are some who are way ahead of this curve, but for Main Street IT, production virtualization still a viewed with some doubts.  Today we also see a cottage industry of products trying to sustain a living on the success of VMware.  These tools are here simply because they address needs and solve problems caused by the adoption of virtualization.  One can see that virtual servers will become the standard in the coming years and outnumber the physical servers carrying only one guest OS.  This adoption is headed the same way Wintel servers overtook their UNIX counterparts.  Therefore it stands to reason that management of virtual environments is also on the critical path.   

As if the complexity of server virtualization wasn’t enough, this space is further complicated by the ability to have virtualized storage, applications, and desktops.  Each successive layer of the stack adds a level of complexity to the management headache.  Understanding how all the virtual components support the business services provided by IT becomes even more challenging.  Ask yourself how many companies have actually implemented virtualization to the extent it is possible?  One potential answer is the added complexity and the associated loss of control.  Consider all the infrastructure components that exist between your customers their data today - load balancers, firewalls, content switches, access switches, routers, several tiers of servers, SAN/NAS switches, and storage arrays.  All of this data is traversing a dynamic complex network.  Given this blurry picture the market is poised for real solutions to solve the additional complex problems created by virtualization. 

The scale of the problem will ultimately be determined by the adoption speed of virtual technologies in any given data center.  Companies are already seeing issues around managing the rapid growth of these technologies, hence the number of articles that discuss virtual sprawl.  Consider the challenge of data center asset management as an example.  Many companies still rely on spreadsheets or other pseudo automated processes for gathering and posting this information.  It’s highly labor intensive, generally inaccurate, and is typically on the edge of becoming too cumbersome to maintain.  That problem is exacerbated in a virtual world.  With the added speed of commissioning virtual servers and their ability to move rapidly between physical hosts the task becomes almost impossible in many places. 

The approach to managing capacity, performance, and availability should essentially be no different, save a few exceptions, for virtual environment than a physical one.  The tools however, by nature may need to change to accommodate virtual environments.  If you focus on solving the problem as it pertains to only the virtual world you will mostly likely fail to capture the return on investment for the entire environment.  Therefore if you simply look to manage the issues that are attached to virtualization you will solve the wrong problem.  Go back to the period of time when various IT buyers used the best in class mentality to acquiring management tools.  That approach provided some tangible benefits to the individual user or group who invested in that solution to solve a specific problem in a silo.  However, as IT business alignment became a driving force these silos found that it was extremely difficult to provide an integrated view of the health of a business service.  Certainly each group operating in a vacuum could prove the problem was not theirs to solve, but many times it didn’t provide the answer that was really required.  Over time buyers became savvy to in their approach to purchasing EM tools instead they focused on the best overall solution, the one that will solve the biggest problems.  That same approach needs to be taken to address these virtualization issues to ensure these solutions scale as required when looking at management tools. 

When you look at all the issues faced in a managing a virtualized IT environment you have to remember the goal at the end of the day is to provide a high quality IT service at the most reasonable cost possible.  A conclusion can be drawn that the best way to conquer the complexity and challenges around virtualization is to tackle this problem using an IT Service Management (ITSM) approach.  The ITSM approach is built equally on three key areas – people, process, and technology.  It is not possible to be successful by covering two areas better to make up for the lack of strength in a third.  The people are typically not the issue in most organizations, as they work to hire and retain qualified talent.  Typical IT shops fall down in the process and/or technology areas and this deficiency is magnified in the virtualized world.  Many times, virtual environments broke the current process model that was constructed with physical infrastructures in mind.  Consider how you might approach performance management, security, or provisioning differently based on the virtual/physical decision.  This same problem also applies to the technology, or tools, portion of the equation.  The existing products deployed didn’t adequately cover virtual environments, or people simply made purchasing decisions based on solving an immediate need related to virtualization.  How does and organization provide a capacity management given a mixed environment of physical and virtual components?   How many organizations made purchasing decisions on technology simply because they didn’t address the gaps in their process?

The points to be taken from all this are simple.  Use a comprehensive ITSM approach to managing the issues around virtualization, considering all the components – people, process, and technology.  Review and modify the current IT processes to incorporate virtual environments.  Review the current technology to determine its ability to provide ITSM class support for both physical and virtual environments.  Understand all of your requirements for managing the entire environment, prioritize those requirements, and then shop for the technology that best fits your needs.