The IT department of each and every organization today, strives to achieve three objectives-agility, efficiency and resiliency. Budgets are getting tightened and there is immense pressure to better utilize resources. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that enterprises are increasingly utilizing new technologies to meet these demands.

Virtualization has been generating much interest in recent times, across both, large and small Indian enterprises. According to the India findings of the 2011 Symantec Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, adoption of server virtualization is the most widespread, with 57 percent of Indian firms implementing server virtualization versus just 45 percent globally. While this is an encouraging trend in terms of cost reduction and meeting increasing demands, it also brings in some inherent challenges. According to the virtualization survey, among organizations implementing server virtualization, more than 70 percent plan to implement virtualization for web and database applications over the next one year. When it comes to business-critical applications, however, 43 percent of CEOs and CFOs are reluctant to make the leap. The most common concern keeping enterprises from making the transition is performance, cited by 81 percent of survey respondents.

Indian enterprises are increasingly discussing virtualization and private/hybrid clouds. While agility and affordability are the main drivers, having fewer legacy systems is helping this transition. According to the survey, however, there are gaps between expectations and reality, which indicates organizations are still learning what these technologies are capable of and how to overcome the new challenges they bring with them.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, the benefits of virtualization are far too valuable for businesses to ignore. Virtualization can reduce capital/operational expenditures, allow for faster deployment of computing resources, and facilitate management of business processes.

Applicable to more than just servers, virtualization is becoming more common in a variety of different IT applications, including storage and desktops. In fact, Indian enterprises have shown a cautious inclination towards shifting business critical application to the virtual environment as well.

Quality of service is the top most priority for organizations. However, concerns do exist on issues such as disaster recovery, meeting high-availability SLAs, authentication vulnerabilities, guaranteeing that data won’t leave the country, and application compatibility.

The challenges of virtualization

Benefits related to cost, performance, scalability etc. are driving the interest around this technology. However, it does come with its fair share of challenges. A high application uptime is crucial to achieve real cost savings. Keeping these needs in mind, IT staff should be aware of the following challenges inherent to a virtualized environment and make provision to address them before implementing further changes.

• Consolidated points of failure: Availability risks are increased since virtualization consolidates the points of failure on fewer servers. In addition, further complexities are introduced by ensuring high availability for business-critical applications if these issues are not addressed, they can lead to single points of failure that can disrupt business operations.

• Visibility limitations: An additional risk posed by virtualization is the lack of visibility into virtualized apps for troubleshooting purposes. When the application components such as the OS and drivers are encapsulated to make portability easier, the result is reduced visibility into the state of those components.

• Human error: There is a higher probability of human error and increased management complexity with virtualized software due to the usage of multiple tools from varying vendors.

How to safeguard yourself?

The IT department of the organization should undertake all steps to mitigate these risks and ensure high application availability.  By taking a proactive approach to application management, rather than simply reacting to problems as they occur, companies can significantly improve their uptime and mitigate challenges posed by virtualization.

Some of the recommended ways are:

• Provision of extensive support: Enterprises should look for solutions that provide support for not just hardware, but also for the different operating systems that the company uses. Implementing one solution across all platforms will reduce complexity and increase reliability, with the additional benefit of minimizing costs related to training and administration.

• Automated failover: An effective solution will detect faults in an application and all its dependent components, including the associated database, operating system, network, and storage resources. In the event of an outage, the solution must be able to restart the application, connect it to the appropriate resources, and resume normal operations.

• Automated disaster recovery testing: Continuous testing of the disaster recovery strategy is critical in order to guarantee a successful recovery in the event of a system or site-wide outage. Non-disruptive testing is necessary in order to maintain productivity while identifying potential issues.

• Multi-cluster management and reporting: Visibility is one of the most important goals in virtualization, but it remains difficult to achieve. Administrators need to be able to monitor, manage, and report on multiple clusters on different platforms, ideally from a single location. The proper reporting tools also make it easier to resolve problems and streamline the operations of your virtualized systems.

The key benefits of virtualization initiatives can be realized, when implemented as mainstream, comprehensive IT initiative in a seamless manner. According to the India findings of the 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery survey, organizations should prioritize planning activities and tools that automate and perform processes which minimize downtime during system upgrades to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

Virtualization has the capability of radically transforming computing by reducing costs and increasing agility. However, an effective downtime management strategy is crucial to fully reap these benefits. Deployment of best practices, can reduce operational complexity, maintain flexibility in selecting hardware and platform vendors, and increase agility in managing the heterogeneous virtual environments. By following some of the recommendations mentioned above, enterprises can tide over the risk of downtime of business-critical applications within a virtualized environment.

The author is Director - Technology at Symantec