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Thinking of launching an operating system or desktop virtualization project? Before you waste time, money and resources, IT consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates suggests asking yourself the following 10 questions:
1. Do you have the right skills?
Lack of appropriate skills is the biggest obstacle to achieving successful virtualization deployments. About three-quarters of enterprise companies contemplating virtualization say that they lack the skills to support the technology. EMA advice: Determine your requirements; document expected changes; test virtualization technology in sample environments; and train your staff before the technology is adopted.
2. Are you ready to cope with the politics accompanying virtualization?
IT departments typically operate autonomously. Political problems often surface when virtualization technology is introduced because IT departments have to work together throughout the implementation process. EMA advice: Prior to implementation, introduce reporting tools explaining how virtualization is helping organizational performance.
3. Can you handle the risks?
While virtualization technology reduces the number of physical resources needed to support multiple systems and applications, it also consolidates applications by creating complex, shared virtual environments. The result is that it increases the probability of problems such as hardware failure, human errors, security breaches and planning snares. EMA advice: Develop detailed business continuity and disaster recovery plans at all stages of the virtualization project.
4. How will your security systems hold up?
Virtualization can introduce security problems (hypervisor infections, rootkit viruses and malicious virtual machines) that organizations can’t detect. EMA advice: IT executives must secure virtual machines as they do physical machines and take extra steps to ensure that the virtual environment is locked down. Technology and disciplines for discovery, configuration and change management have become more critical than ever.
5. Are your systems and applications compatible?
Virtualization doesn’t work with some applications and systems. For example, applications with highly efficient usage or severe requirement spikes, or that interact directly with hardware, can stall a virtualization project. EMA advice: Do your homework prior to virtualization deployment to determine compatibility.
6. Do you have a capacity-planning discipline?
Virtual server sprawl is a common result of virtualization deployments. EMA advice: IT organizations should consider using detailed capacity-planning measures to make sure they have sufficient hardware and software resources to support their virtualization implementation.
7. Can your environments be supported?
While many popular packaged applications support virtualization, many applications do not. EMA advice: Before rolling out virtualization, IT departments ought to investigate which of their software and hardware platforms are supported and which ones need to be upgraded.
8. Can your network support virtualization?
Potential bottlenecks for virtualization in your data center are your network and storage. For example, technologies that focus on the user (application or desktop virtualization, application streaming) don’t work well over low-bandwidth connections. EMA advice: IT managers ought to consider addressing network and storage limitations with WAN-optimization technologies or by limiting the proliferation of images.
9. Can your management systems handle virtual environments?
While virtualization reduces the number of physical resources to manage, it also increases the complexity of the overall environment by introducing problems IT managers aren’t prepared for. For example: Ease of deployment leads to a proliferation of virtual machines or virtual server sprawl, which makes management exponentially more difficult. And the added layer of software increases the complexity of managing the entire environment.
There are a number of myths about the physical layer of data centers, according to Larry Cantwell, vice president and CTO of OnPATH Technologies in Lumberton, N.J. One of them is that the physical layer of a data center is static and, as a result, problem-free. “The reality is that the physical layer is stressed every time new equipment is introduced, old equipment is removed, or existing equipment and cables are moved at a data center,” Cantwell explains. “Tangled and fragile cables, plugs and wiring can physically limit your ability to scale and consolidate--and most are not monitored for health and usage. Up to 70 percent of network downtime can be attributed to cabling problems.”
EMA advice: Until management tools catch up with virtualization, the solution is setting up process disciplines for discovery, performance management, configuration management, patch management, service-level management, provisioning and disaster recovery.
10. Does virtualization address business objectives?
A major problem is failing to align virtual technology implementation with business goals. EMA advice: To measure the success of a virtualization rollout, IT departments must first set down their goals before deploying the technology. IT managers must plan for long-term strategic results and not use virtualization as a quick fix. For example, they must go way beyond the obvious cost savings of virtualization.
