In a recent newsletter we mentioned that we have just begun to publish the 2011 application and service delivery handbook and that we were publishing it for the first time in a serial fashion. In another recent newsletter we mentioned that the handbook highlights the fact that an IT organization’s ability to ensure acceptable application and service delivery is dramatically impacted by the growing adoption of virtualization and cloud computing. We will use the next two newsletters to discuss some of the ways that virtualization is making application and service delivery more challenging and we will point out how IT organizations are responding to those challenges.
We have been publishing the handbook annually for the last five years and we conduct market research each year. Because we have been gathering market research data over a long time frame, we have a lot of insight into how IT organizations are evolving. For example, when we conducted market research for the 2010 edition of the handbook, only 20% of IT organizations stated that they had virtualized the majority of the data center servers. This year’s market research indicates that 32% of IT organizations have virtualized the majority of the data center servers and a year from now that number is expected to grow to 40%.
One of the often discussed challenges that is introduced by the deployment of virtualized servers is that due to the limitations of vSwitches, once a server has been virtualized IT organizations loose visibility into the inter-VM traffic. This limits the IT organization’s ability to perform functions such as security filtering or performance monitoring and troubleshooting. What our research shows is that while IT organizations are concerned with their lack of ability to manage inter-VM traffic, it is not one of their top issues.
One of the other challenges that is brought about by server virtualization is that many of the same management tasks that must be performed in the traditional server environment need to be both extended into the virtualized environment and also integrated with the existing workflow and management processes. One example of the need to extend functionality from the physical server environment into the virtual server environment is that IT organizations must be able to automatically discover both the physical and the virtual environment and have an integrated view of both environments. In contrast to their concern about managing inter-VM traffic, half of the IT organizations that we surveyed consider it to be either very or extremely important over the next year for them to get better performing management tasks such as troubleshooting on a per-VM basis.
In the next newsletter we will continue to discuss how virtualization impacts application and service delivery. In the mean time, we encourage you to download for free the first couple of serialized publications of the 2011 application and service delivery handbook. They can be found here.
