* Should IT organizations be looking to implement virtualization as a means of saving money?
The recent IT Roadmap conference in Chicago began with Jim and two other analysts on stage being asked questions by John Gallant. Given the current economic conditions, the question and answer session focused on cost savings. One of the questions posed to Jim was, “Should IT organizations be looking to implement virtualization as a means of saving money?” Jim’s answer was yes, but only if they realize the impact that virtualization has on the WAN, on management, and on application delivery. The next few newsletters will explain exactly what that impact is.
Virtualization is a very broad topic. The last time we wrote about it, we focused on virtual appliances such as a virtual WAN optimization controller (WOC) or a virtual firewall. In this newsletter, we will focus on virtual servers.
Server virtualization refers to the ability of a single physical server to be partitioned to appear as multiple independent virtual machines (VM). Server virtualization is a very hot topic now because it typically results in a reduction in the number of servers in the corporate data center. This, of course, leads to significant savings in both capital and operating expenses. As such, server virtualization helps IT organizations realize one of the goals of application delivery: ensuring that application usage is cost effective. So, getting back to Gallant’s question – server virtualization seems like a good idea.
Server virtualization does, however, create some significant challenges. One of these challenges is that in a typical setting servers are connected by a switch and there is management functionality inside the switch that enables the IT organization to monitor the inter-switch traffic. However, once the server has been virtualized IT organizations typically loose visibility into the traffic that goes between VMs on a single physical server.
The bad news is that we see this type of situation all too often. IT implements some new technology for all of the benefits the technology provides, but then looses management visibility. For example, in a past newsletter we pointed out how deploying a WOC can cause IT organizations to loose management visibility. We point this out to encourage IT organizations to consider management as part of evaluating any new technology or service.
In our next newsletter we will discuss what vendors are doing to address this issue and will continue our discussion relative to the impact that server virtualization has on the WAN.
