Thursday, December 09, 2010
What’s holding CIOs back from virtualization?
Posted by:
Brian Pereira
While we have seen the immense benefits of server virtualization, CIOs are apprehensive about virtualizing other resources such as storage and applications. I think it’s important for vendors and service providers to empathize with CIOs rather than make aggressive pitches for virtualization solutions.
Server virtualization can reduce footprint and energy consumption in the data center, and optimize capacity utilization. But if not managed properly it can also throw up a new set of challenges, like VM (virtual machine) sprawl for instance. While the count of physical servers drops, the number of VMs or operating system instances increases multifold. And that becomes a management headache.
Vendors should focus on educating IT managers about the appropriate tools and best practices to contain or manage VM sprawl. And IT managers need to do a careful evaluation or analysis of VM requirements across the enterprise.
Then there’s storage virtualization. But before you virtualize, you need to consolidate. Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM at Hitachi Data Systems India, says customers perceive storage consolidation as a risky proposition. The second inhibitor is multi-vendor support. “Typically, it’s a heterogeneous environment and when you consolidate it into say, Hitachi’s storage, that becomes a central point of virtualization,” says Venugopal.
But should one get past all these hindrances and actually virtualize their storage, there’s no doubt that the business benefits are very significant. Vendors say storage costs can drop by 20 – 40 percent. There is another benefit. By virtualizing the storage you can drive additional virtual machines. How? Talk to Vmware about VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration).
Then there’s the question of virtualizing the applications and the data. Most applications were not written to run in a virtualized environment, and hence if virtualized, they present a host of problems. Vendors need to work with customers to set up a test environment and simulate daily workloads to ascertain that the apps “behave” in a virtualized environment. Will the vendor continue to offer support once the application is virtualized?
Data virtualization means consolidating or aggregating data from different repositories across the organization and then presenting a single, logical view of it through dashboards or portals. That’s going to be a huge challenge especially when data lies in different databases and is generated or accessed using a plethora of applications.
Desktop virtualization is another form that is becoming widespread in organizations. But the challenges here are network performance and user acceptance. The connectivity between the server and the clients, especially over a WAN, has got to be seamless; and employees are so used to having control of the data and applications on the desktop.
With almost everything going virtual these days, I wonder what’s going to be the next form of virtualization.