TAKE 1
Virtualization Laggards There’s a group
of procrastinators out there who have yet to adopt virtualization from a
production standpoint, preferring instead to relegate it to test and
dev — or not implement it at all. What these laggards don’t know is that
small and midsize businesses now have access to solutions that will
enable them to adopt virtualization in a safe, reliable manner via
preassembled virtualization solutions that come complete with rack,
servers, storage, networking and power.
TAKE 2
Economic Barriers When you look at the
cost structures of modern datacenters — which are partially driven by
virtualization — hardware costs have obviously come down and consume a
much smaller percentage of budgets. However, the licensing and support
costs associated with the software elements of both the hypervisor and
virtualization management
have expanded and become a much larger percentage of total spend. It
all comes down to economic barriers that prevent some companies from
adopting virtualization — they just don’t have enough money.
TAKE 3
Good News, Bad News The good news is
that virtualization has solved a lot of capital expenditure problems.
The bad news is found in a recent white paper written by a VP at Morgan
Stanley that said, when you look at the costs of administering a virtual
server, it requires nearly the same amount of activity that’s required
to manage the old physical server. You’ve still got to initially deploy
it, patch it, secure it, update it and at some point retire it. Also,
virtual machines are free, so the number of server instances users are
running in their infrastructures has gone through the roof. So even if
it’s 50 percent of the cost of maintaining that virtual image versus a
physical server, you have 10 times the number of virtual servers.
TAKE 4
Physical Layer Problems Despite its many
benefits, server virtualization has created a problem in the physical
layer because with virtual infrastructures, users have an expectation
that they’re able to have a much more dynamic environment. For instance,
they can spin systems up more quickly. Or, they might have put a device
in place because from a virtual standpoint, it can be easily moved
around. The problem is, the underlying physical infrastructure
isn’t that dynamic and can’t keep up with the dynamism of the virtual
layer. So when you think about the need to deploy or even change the
physical layer underneath the virtual layer, customers have a hard time
keeping up from both an operational expense standpoint and from a pure
speed standpoint. This is the problem that converged infrastructures are
trying to solve.
TAKE 5
Meeting Dynamic Demands There’s a
challenge around virtual server operations management because when users
are virtualizing their environments, it’s more difficult to spot
performance issues because nobody knows where everything resides. Is the
storage really on that device, or is it on another tier? Did it move
over to that array, and where are the networking connections? Where’s
that virtual server now, because with Distributed Resource Scheduler it
can be moved around and consolidated? Also, because you’ve abstracted an
environment, it’s hard to actually diagnose problems and manage
performance. When you can’t see all the important elements, you can’t
fix the problems.
I'm: Kiss