The Data Center Building Project, Straddling Physical and Virtualized Environments

Posted July 16th, 2008 by Joe Pendry

As we have blogged in the past, virtualization is one of the hot topics in IT Operations for 2008. There’s continuous press coverage about the trend. Bloggers like Tarry Singh and Dan Kusnetzky focus on all aspects of virtualization. It is difficult to fathom the future of IT Operations without considering the significant impact that virtualization will have in the Data Center.

In fact, at two recent events that we attended – the Gartner IOM conference and the Mid-size Enterprise Summit – 80 to 90 percent of attendees report using virtualization in their production environments. Virtualization seems to be everywhere.

But just how close are we to being completely virtualized? Recent studies have mentioned less than 10 percent of server workloads have been virtualized. This means that, even though virtualization is getting lots of hype, most environments are comprised of hybrid physical/virtual infrastructures.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to any watcher of data center evolution. Remember the death of the mainframe? Tell that to IBM and users as mainframe business continues to be robust for many vendors and in use for many IT services.

The reality of IT operations teams is not one of smooth change from a physical world to a virtualized world, but instead a long term building project – with new virtualized components and infrastructure being leveraged on top of the physical reality that exists today.

This “building project” only complicates the life of the IT operation professional. For example, virtualization presents some significant management challenges that are a top concern for the leading vendors. But because most environments won’t be 100% virtualized any time soon, everything from systems management to change testing to performance measurement must be done in such a way that considers both the significant investment in legacy physical infrastructure, as well as new virtualized components.

So even as the conversation about the value of virtualization continues to gain headlines and generate buzz, let’s not forget that to the IT Operations team, it is just a part of building project that is the modern software infrastructure stack.