According to Gartner, the next leading technology is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures.
But the flexibility provided by virtualization seems to cause the issue with the management of virtual infrastructure itself.
For Example installing a new virtual machine is a piece of cake. "Just clone your master image to a new VM and you are done within a few seconds". The problem is that the number of servers might grow faster than the number of administrators who are supposed to manage them. Looking into the future, we can anticipate that complexity becomes a critical issue in hypervisor management.
Consolidating servers onto virtual infrastructure brings tremendous benefits, but it also creates new management challenges for CIOs and IT administrators and most tricky one is "How to leverage the benefits provided by virtualization technology itself such as"
- Enabling more efficient provisioning of new systems
- Increasing speed and efficiency of back-up and recovery
- Reducing monitoring, reporting and chargeback inefficiencies
- High availability
- Optimized resource utilization
Virtualization technology is not a silver bullet; it is merely a great enabler. A disciplined approach to an aligned process must accompany the technology.If virtualization is the optimizer, a customized virtualization process will, in essence, optimize the optimizer. Done right, it will sustain and compound ROI and become a powerful advantage for any company.
Different virtualization platforms provide various interfaces to outer world, to leverage benefits of particular virtualization platform in a most optimized manner.
It's very important to understand these interfaces in depth because :
- If not handled properly, the flexibility provided by virtualization platform might have some adverse effects. E.g. virtualization allows user to allocate the resources at the run time. Some sloppy allocation algorithm might cause drastic damage to organization.
- Sustain the virtualization ROI by leveraging the virtualization benefits. E.g. every organization needs to allocate costs based on actual resource pool utilization rates. Virtual machines are not free! If an organization behaves as if they were, they will soon be dealing with a "Virtual Sprawl" and end up with an even bigger problem on their hands.
- One major technical issue facing organizations looking to add virtualization to their IT infrastructure are the limitations of system platform tools. As the virtual machine count begins to creep up, and it's required to understand how to gather granular performance data necessary to give the IT staff a complete picture of what's going on. E.g. standard monitoring and reporting tools that were sufficient in a physical environment tend to fall short in a virtual one
- So, every organization looking to adopt the virtualization technology also requires complementary solutions which understands these interfaces and enables them to implement and mange the virtual infrastructure in the most optimized way
Note::
Till now every virtualization platform vendor provides its own interfaces, there are no real standards when it comes to virtual infrastructure management. This is cause of concern for the organization which has infrastructure made upon heterogeneous virtualization platform
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
