Capacity management challenges persist in virtual environments

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

Capacity planning has long been considered one of the more mysterious disciplines in IT, but when the dynamic nature of virtual systems comes into play, understanding the resources needed to drive business application and support end users becomes a critical skills for many IT organizations.

Are you ready for IT resource planning?

A recent survey of 257 IT professionals with decision-making power around virtualization showed that capacity management topped the list of operational concerns for respondents. The survey was conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by IT management software maker CA. Among many other issues, accurately planning for resource demand and consumption represented a daunting task.

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Capacity planning has long been considered one of the more mysterious disciplines in IT, but when the dynamic nature of virtual systems comes into play, understanding the resources needed to drive business application and support end users becomes a critical skills for many IT organizations.

Are you ready for IT resource planning?

A recent survey of 257 IT professionals with decision-making power around virtualization showed that capacity management topped the list of operational concerns for respondents. The survey was conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by IT management software maker CA. Among many other issues, accurately planning for resource demand and consumption represented a daunting task.

"Capacity planning and management are mysteries in a virtualized environment because the exact capacity of the infrastructure is hidden beneath the complexity of virtualized systems. This causes confusion around managing the performance of the infrastructure, which imposes excessive risk to business services reliant upon physical servers,” the January report, titled “Virtualization Management and Trends” reads. “The issues are more pronounced than models based on physical servers. Users need improved processes and tools to gain the necessary visibility into capacity and infrastructure performance.”

For this study, 10% of respondents ranked capacity management and planning as a top operational concern, ranking it first. While 11% indicated that security and lacking IT skills were their number one operational concern, 11% ranked capacity planning second and 12% placed it third among top concerns, making it overall the top operational concern.

“By abstracting the virtual servers from the raw physical hardware, the actual resource requirements become more ambiguous. This introduces confusion and risk around the performance and stability of workloads that are intended for virtual servers,” the report reads. “Many workloads remain on physical servers because the risk is too high. For dynamic private cloud deployments, there is an opportunity to integrate real-time capacity planning with performance analysis.”

The worry around capacity planning, security and IT staffing could be the reason many companies can’t get the amount of servers virtualized in their environment past an average of 30%.

“We still are just not getting over that hump. We see the level of virtualized servers at 30% today, and many predict that will grow to more like 50% in two years, but honestly everyone was saying the same two years ago,” says Andi Mann, vice president of virtualization product marketing at CA. “I don’t think the economy played a role in slowing it down, rather the downturn economy probably sped up adoption rates.”

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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.