Virtual management start-ups weigh in on best practices

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Virtualization is a game-changing technology that has many IT managers looking for the best ways to roll out the technology on a large scale in their environments.

Network World this week shared with readers a handful of best practices industry watchers and enterprise IT managers suggest others take into account when rolling out virtualization. We were also able to provide a glimpse at several gotchas IT managers should avoid when evolving virtual server deployment from test and development to full-blown product environments. And a couple of industry technologist also weighed in on the topic.

Dave Malcolm, CTO of virtual lab management and automation vendor Surgient, chimed in with a few pointers on how to best approach an enterprise-wide virtualization implementation. To start, he says, "It is important to select the appropriate hardware particularly around servers and storage appliances. Larger servers tend to be better because there are fewer physical machine boundaries and therefore less wasted capacity."

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Virtualization is a game-changing technology that has many IT managers looking for the best ways to roll out the technology on a large scale in their environments.

Network World this week shared with readers a handful of best practices industry watchers and enterprise IT managers suggest others take into account when rolling out virtualization. We were also able to provide a glimpse at several gotchas IT managers should avoid when evolving virtual server deployment from test and development to full-blown product environments. And a couple of industry technologist also weighed in on the topic.

Dave Malcolm, CTO of virtual lab management and automation vendor Surgient, chimed in with a few pointers on how to best approach an enterprise-wide virtualization implementation. To start, he says, "It is important to select the appropriate hardware particularly around servers and storage appliances. Larger servers tend to be better because there are fewer physical machine boundaries and therefore less wasted capacity."

Next, IT managers must test application images thoroughly to ensure optimal performance on the virtual infrastructure, Malcolm says. "This entails configuring the appropriate operating system services, removing potential security exposures and compressing image sizes," he explains. "These images need to be tested and verified in virtual machines to ensure that the applications which run within the virtual machine are performing at the desired level prior to deployment.

Lastly Malcolm recommends IT managers put in places tools to centrally manage virtual machines and virtual machine images. These tools should also incorporate life-cycle management capabilities that help IT better track virtual machines from creation to expiration. 

"The image file hierarchy and structure need to be designed such that there is reused and minimal wasted storage," Malcolm says. "Virtual machine image sprawl can be expensive in additional storage if not managed effectively."

Separately, John Suit, CTO at virtual systems management vendor Fortisphere, says IT managers need to know what is in their virtualized environment "down to the configurations, applications and virtual network utilization within the virtual machine" to optimize performance.

"An ideal system … would be able to tell you exactly which virtual machines were cloned, which were duplicated, how and where there is any delta between them, and visually depict that lineage," Suit says.

Suit also recommends IT managers be able to create and enforce policies with any system they put in place to manage virtual infrastructure. IT needs to back up its planning with technology to automate policy-based management.

"There is no substitute for proper planning based on sound policy, as we all know. It's all well and good that the platform providers have given us the wherewithal to template, copy and clone every virtual machine we can get our hands on," 'Suit says. "What is required is clarity on what we have, where it is, when it got there and what dependencies it has."

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.