How Acceptable Is Virtualization?

bob weinstein - April 13, 2009 According to a recent IT spending survey by Goldman Sachs, 45 percent of respondents expect to virtualize more than 30 percent of their servers (up from only 7 percent today), pointing up a more aggressive penetration of virtualization. 

A report last month conducted by Forrester Research, “Storage Choices for Virtual Server Environments,” stated that most organizations use VMware, with a small portion preferring Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer. Applications that are the biggest contenders to be virtualized included Web, commercial off-the-shelf and infrastructure applications.
 
When Forrester interviewed IT decision-makers to find out their top storage problems in a virtual server environment, they identified the following:

• Maintaining high performance. It’s best achieved by working with a vendor to fully test possible configurations in a lab environment that closely resembles production workloads.
• Server virtualization increases backup complexity. Because the ratio of virtual machines to physical hosts increases for most companies, they find that backing up new data within defined maintenance windows is difficult.
• Server virtualization decreases capacity utilization. Companies complain that it’s difficult to maintain a consistently efficient process for allocating storage to virtual …

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