The Data Center of Today: Managing the Physical and Virtual

Posted October 2nd, 2008 by Joe Pendry

We commented on an interesting story in eChannelLine last week as a part of our Friday links post. The bulk of the story focused on how different organizations plan to approach virtualization over the next year.

As you might imagine, organizations are still getting accustomed to virtualization. Only a quarter of those surveyed mentioned that they are “very confident” in their existing management tools when it comes to maintaining service level agreements under virtualization.

But a point made later in the article is particular worthy of further consideration:

“Why are some customers not yet running tier-one mission critical applications in a VMware based production environment? Respondents cited multiple reasons at the same time — 42 per cent have performance concerns, another 40 per cent are in early stage of VMware pilots and testing and 26 per cent admitted lacking sufficient skills and training for VMware solutions inside their corporate IT departments.”

Virtualization has driven lots of buzz, but many organizations are just now getting their feet wet. This means we are in a transition period for the time being, where virtualized and physical environments work together to support both tier-one and tier-two applications.

As we have mentioned, this is an environment that is ripe for problems and (possibly) downtime. Hybrid environments are more complex and, as we know, complexity can lead to downtime when an organization needs to make changes – ranging from large upgrades to basic patches. And finding the cause of the problems is also made harder in environments like those, as the story indicates:

“…nearly 48 per cent stated that isolating root cause problems within a tier one application production environment is ‘the number one challenge’ for server based virtualization.”

Many organizations are going to be slowly introducing virtualization into their environments over the next two or three years. They aren’t going to make it to the Data Center of Tomorrow overnight. They need to make sure they address the downtime concerns and management needs of the Data Center of Today.