they haven’t previously dealt with,” wrote Gartner analyst
Rene Millman in a report on virtualization published in
April 2009.
In order to truly reap the benefits of virtualization,
pump up the percentage of virtualized servers and depend
on the technology to support mission-critical applications,
enterprises must adjust their virtualization strategies to
account for the changes this new technology introduces
into the server room.
“We see companies struggling to figure out how to
increase the level of virtualization in their servers and do
it in a responsible, budgetary way,” says Alex Bakman, CEO
of VKernel, a virtualization management vendor. “From a
cost-benefit perspective, they are clearly saving on electricity and on the amount of physical space that servers need,
but they also realize that there are many surprises along
the way, so things are costing a lot more than what they
expected.”
FACING THE CHALLENGES
So what virtualization surprises have started smacking IT
leaders in the face? The biggest challenge that has bubbled up quickly is that of management visibility, says Jon
Blomeier, data center analyst for Hershey Entertainment &
Resort Co. in Hershey, Pa.
“The downside of [virtualization] is losing the visibility
into my environment,” he says. “I think I speak for a lot of
different people when I say the biggest challenge is trying
to know everything about your virtual environment in the
same way you did when it was all physical.”
Blomeier says that over the last several years, he and
the team at Hershey have brought their data center servers
to approximately 70 percent virtualized. They have struggled because even though the shared resources within the
hypervisor help them reduce overhead in a number of
areas, they present challenges to troubleshooting.
Like many IT managers, Blomeier discovered several
years ago that if he was going to get his virtualization levels to where they are now, his organization needed a way
to manage and optimize its virtual machines. Two years
ago, he brought in VKernel’s suite of third-party virtualization management tools to give his team a deeper dive into
“The biggest challenge is trying to know everything about your virtual environment in the same way you did when it was all physical.”
—Jon Blomeier, data center analyst,
Hershey Entertainment & Resort Co.
system performance analytics and better troubleshooting
controls over virtual machines.
“The [key] thing we wanted to know was what was
going on within the machines: how they were performing and whether it was disk I/O or any of the other pieces
that made the machine tick,” he says. “I wanted to know
whether there were performance issues that could be
addressed by adjusting things like memory and CPU, and
also whether systems were running optimally or were
over-allocated.”
Blomeier isn’t alone in the IT world. According to the
analysts at Gartner, the server virtualization management
market is expected to grow at a 38 percent annual rate over
the next several years, reaching $4 billion by 2013. The reason for such growth, the analysts say, is that organizations
such as Hershey are crying out for tools that can enable
them to optimize their virtualization deployment.
As it stands, says VKernel’s Bakman, visibility is only
the first among several challenges that virtualization brings
with it. Others are capacity planning and monitoring, as
well as storage management.
“In the previrtualized data center, every Windows server
ran one application,” he says. “The server did not have to
share memory, CPU or storage, so capacity planning and
capacity monitoring were really nonexistent. In the virtualized data center, they are key processes to ensure that core
performance and availability are good.”
This is especially true for storage management and
planning, which has become an extremely expensive
prospect in the virtualization era. In order to take advantage of the mobility of virtual machines (VMs) offered
by enterprise virtualization solutions, organizations must
place these machines on expensive storage networks, a
not-so-insignificant detail that some enterprises didn’t
consider before deciding to virtualize.
“I’ve spoken with a lot of customers and prospects who
said, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that just to get started, I needed
to spend $500,000 on Fibre Channel SCSI common storage arrays,’” Bakman says. “And that’s only the beginning
of what they need. Because they have been going nuts
starting new, easy-to-create VMs so quickly, they’re facing virtual machine sprawl, so they have already filled up
