As the transition to virtualized architecture continues to accelerate, companies are learning that its benefits don’t come without pitfalls. Simply setting up a virtualized environment and throwing the existing application inventory into it is insufficient. Ill-planned implementations like this could expose the organization to unacceptable risk.

As compelling as it may seem to collapse multiple conventional servers into relatively few virtualized ones, doing so will impact nearly all facets of IT infrastructure. The application inventory, for example, will be affected by any transition to virtualization, as not all software can tolerate the new environment.

Far-Reaching Implications

The effects of a virtualization implementation extend beyond applications to processes, as well. Disaster recovery plans will need to be rewritten to ensure they are optimized for a virtualized architecture. Monitoring processes will also have to evolve, as will storage solutions and strategies. The far-reaching effects of virtualization highlight the critical need to have extensive plans in place before anything goes virtual.

“Your strategy should present an overview of the current business and IT pains you are looking to solve through your virtualization implementation,” says Ilan Paretsky, vice president of marketing for Ericom (www.ericom.com). “As difficult as it is, your strategy should incorporate your IT road map for the next five years, or at least the guidelines and highlights of such.”

The strategy must incorporate organizational impacts as well as the harder technology-focused ones. Mike Strohl, president of Entisys Solutions (www.entisys.com), a virtualization solutions integrator, says virtualization rewrites the rules that governed how servers, storage, and networking were used in the previrtualization era.

“Departments that had traditionally been in silos are suddenly intertwined,” says Strohl. “Failure to identify this and plan the technology can result in bottlenecks and disaster.”

Governance is a key component of this process because virtualized environments can scale much more quickly than traditional ones. Strohl recommends holding sessions involving stakeholders from all affected business areas and IT to ensure they understand how virtualization increases the need for them to work together and how they’ll build policy frameworks to properly manage provisioning and acceptance in the new shared technology environment.

“Without proper governance in place, a well-built system can be quickly overloaded, creating the perception that the virtual environment is not mature enough,” says Strohl. “Proper planning and understanding is everything.”

Companies that attempt to virtualize without taking steps to plan and understand could be in for a painful and expensive lesson, says Ed Hallock, senior director of solutions management with ASG Software Solutions (www.asg.com).

“Organizations that run headlong into virtualization without a cohesive strategy will eventually get a morning-after reality check,” he says. “The initial cost savings of virtualization can be huge—up to 50% in hardware costs and even more if you factor in lower energy consumption and improved disaster recovery. But in the long run, few enterprises will achieve the full potential of virtualization as they struggle with new problems like ensuring performance and availability, preventing VM sprawl, and maximizing resource utilization.”

Scalability Is Key

Growth of data over time highlights the need to understand scalability and incorporate it into any virtualization strategy. Mike Palin, CEO of Leostream (www.leostream.com), says scalability is a huge issue in virtualization.

“Solutions that perform well in a small trial deployment may not perform well at all when it is expanded to the larger enterprise,” he says. “Conduct stringent due diligence so that you can be sure that what occurs in the lab is representative of what will occur in a full deployment.”

Part of this process involves avoiding single-vendor solutions. “Effective virtualization implementations will have to accommodate for hardware, software, and hypervisors from multiple vendors,” says Paretsky. “This means that you have to make sure that your chosen solutions are agnostic and that all of these different components from different vendors can live together.”

People Go Virtual, Too

The human factor can be another hidden pitfall of virtualization. The desire to see virtualization as a supposed cure-all for IT-related issues can lead to disagreement down the road. Doug Hazelman, director of the global systems engineer group at Veeam (www.veeam.com), says planners must anticipate this and set expectations in advance.

“If an application has problems on a physical system, it will still have problems on a virtual system,” says Hazelman. “During virtualization projects, there’s always a lot of finger-pointing at the virtual environment as the cause of the issue when the problem may actually lie much deeper. Virtualization has a tendency to bring to light application deficiencies that have actually existed all along.”

By studying these deficiencies, IT can better prepare the rest of the organization for virtualization. In many respects, the thinking around the technology must evolve as much as the technology itself.

“The common misunderstanding is that you ‘move’ to a virtualized environment,” says Richard Whitehead, Novell’s director of marketing for data center solutions (www.novell.com). “The reality is that virtualization is part of your IT infrastructure. You need to think intelligently about your data center across physical, virtual, and cloud. One of the largest oversights is in the management of virtualization, including security. Take time now to create a strategy, track the results, and ensure you are virtualizing for business reasons.”

by Carmi Levy