Survey Shows IT Leaders Lack Confidence in Virtualization
By Michelle Savage
April 1, 2008 — Survey results from management-software maker CA show that IT leaders are turning to server virtualization in large numbers, but many are unable to say whether their virtualization deployments are successful.
A majority—54 percent—of CIOs and other executives around the world consider virtual server environment management a high IT priority, but 45 percent say they are not doing it effectively.
The survey showed that the perceived benefits for virtualization are easier hardware provisioning and software deployment, lower total cost of ownership, optimizing system performance, and more flexible development and testing environments.
Fifty six percent of respondents reported using multiple platforms/vendors for server virtualization management, while 35 percent used a centralized platform. Sixty eight percent rated the importance of centralizing the management of multi-platform virtualized or physical environments as critical or very important.
According to Lakshmi Pedda, Senior Product Marketing Manager for CA, those organizations with multiple virtualized server environments face major management problems, including server sprawl, configuration workload changes, difficulties in reporting and resource limitations. She said it is beneficial for companies to move from a model that uses management tools to one that centralizes virtual, physical and clustered environments.
Scott Gordon, Sales Engineer at ActivSupport, a network consulting firm, argued that one of the most attractive parts of virtualization is the ability to combine multiple servers using less physical hardware. “The best strategy is to deploy at least two servers,” he said. “You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. If you did, when the single host went down, you’d lose all your servers.”
He added that other benefits of virtualization are business continuity and disaster recovery. “Virtualization converts existing servers into ‘files’ and allows you to move those files quickly,” he said. “If a physical server goes down, you could take those ‘files’ and move or redeploy them to another server quickly.”
Security represents the biggest challenge in managing virtualization initiatives, said 42 percent of respondents. Historical physical boundaries that provided inherent security across applications are now gone and it takes more effort to insulate one application from another since more applications are running on a single piece of hardware.
Measuring return on investment (ROI) was cited as another major management challenge. Just 28 percent of respondents said they had an effective method to measure the ROI on virtualization solutions. However, 51 percent indicated they were confident that their companies are maximizing the return on virtualization investments.
“Virtualization is improving, and it is becoming much easier to show ROI,” said Gordon. “When it comes time for a company’s technology replacement cycle, most people are deploying virtualization. When they do, the ROI is clear. For example, a company has 10 servers. When it deploys virtualization, it will have three or four, resulting in significant upfront cost savings. Managers will also see additional savings over time, in management, maintenance, etc.”
The survey revealed that over the next 18 months the percent of respondents using virtualization in production to support non-mission critical and mission-critical applications, as well as the percent using virtualization to support business continuity and disaster recovery, is expected to grow.
Pedda said that the study confirmed what CA regularly sees in the industry—that IT managers are increasingly realizing the breadth and depth of opportunity that virtualization presents to them. She added that, aside from the study, there are many indications that IT professionals are adopting virtualization and reaching a level of comfort with it. “When we participated in an IT roadshow, many people signed up for the virtualization track,” she said. “We’ve also seen many more beta testers for our next release than we had for the one before.
“Most companies deploying virtualization are just now moving from the pilot environment to the production environment,” continued Pedda. “Many are now at the stage where they can use it in mission-critical applications with more confidence from a management perspective.”
Among the mission-critical business services cited by survey respondents to be used in a virtualized environment are IT infrastructure management (53 percent), followed by customer service (49 percent) and accounting/finance (48 percent).
Gordon said that most challenges of virtualization are due to the fact that most companies are relatively new to virtualization. “Most initial deployments are learning lessons,” he said. “I think one of the most important lessons is that there are some things that you don’t want to skimp on when it comes to hardware. In virtualization, CPU, storage and memory should be invested in.”
Pedda added that companies need to commit to virtualization as a long-term strategy. “This is not a short-term initiative,” she said. “Companies need to look at the big picture in terms of what their data center will look like in five years, lay the goals and objectives on the table, and let their stakeholders have a say.”
Related Search Term(s): CA, virtualization
Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/31901