Virtual insecurity: Who's in control of your virtual machines?

Server virtualization has reached an inflection point in the enterprise at the 10-year mark. Capital expense savings from physical server consolidation are leveling off and early gains in IT operational efficiency are at risk due to rapidly growing and increasingly complex virtual infrastructures. Moreover, business-critical production applications -- the next virtualization frontier -- demand higher levels of service and strict security and compliance oversight, further challenging IT operations teams.

10 must-have virtualization tools

The next phase of virtualization is about control, with the emphasis on efficiency, performance and agility. What's needed now are "command and control" management solutions that go beyond the inventory-focused tools prevalent today. In order to virtualize more workloads faster while protecting returns, next-generation tools need to address access control, policy enforcement, configuration control and activity logging.

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Server virtualization has reached an inflection point in the enterprise at the 10-year mark. Capital expense savings from physical server consolidation are leveling off and early gains in IT operational efficiency are at risk due to rapidly growing and increasingly complex virtual infrastructures. Moreover, business-critical production applications -- the next virtualization frontier -- demand higher levels of service and strict security and compliance oversight, further challenging IT operations teams.

10 must-have virtualization tools

The next phase of virtualization is about control, with the emphasis on efficiency, performance and agility. What's needed now are "command and control" management solutions that go beyond the inventory-focused tools prevalent today. In order to virtualize more workloads faster while protecting returns, next-generation tools need to address access control, policy enforcement, configuration control and activity logging.

The coming decade will be marked as the period during which virtualization matured from an enabling technology into a core data center infrastructure layer -- in many respects, a new operating system spanning every tier of the application stack and affecting all aspects of server and workload management.

While Taneja Group research shows 18% to 25% of application workloads in medium-to-large U.S. enterprises are virtualized, plans are in place to virtualize up to 25% more by the end of 2012. To date, most virtualized workloads have been Tier 2 and below (lower-priority and internal applications), but the clear trend is toward Tier 1, business-critical workload virtualization. Indeed, more than 70% of enterprises surveyed report that they are not only comfortable with deploying critical applications on shared, virtualized servers, but are also actively doing so.

Virtualization in transition: Losing control

The proliferation of server virtualization, as with any disruptive data center technology, is eventually limited by its impact on management and control processes.

Administrators are facing an explosion in the number of virtual hosts and virtual machines (VM) under management, with immature monitoring tools and ad hoc control processes. Inventory management is more difficult and utilization rates suffer from "orphaned" or overprovisioned VMs -- both signs of VM sprawl.

At the same time, the shift from lower-priority workloads to Tier 1 mission-critical workloads requires additional oversight from overworked operations teams, eroding efficiency. Mission-critical workloads depend on consistent, enforced server configurations, and often rely on sensitive data that is subject to corporate, industry and/or government regulations. Without adequate, enforced security controls, compliance risk will continue to escalate, tied to the rate of critical workload virtualization; ideally, compliance risk should rise in a controlled manner as additional workloads are virtualized.

The virtualization effect on IT operations is more than a theoretical concern. According to Taneja Group research into resource sharing in midsize and large enterprises, 89% of data center managers say administrators are losing time due to the limitations of virtualization management tools and processes. Of these, half say at least 10% of administrator time is being lost, while 1 in 5 reported a 25% or more reduction in efficiency.