Survey Shows IT Leaders Lack Confidence in Virtualization

By Michelle Savage

April 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
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.

Related Search Term(s): CA, virtualization

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