Brick Walls Of Virtualization is the title of a recent post by Dan Woods at Forbes.com. The subtitle is, "Without automation, creating and managing system images will slow adoption." I could not agree more.
The "brick walls" refer to the burdens of virtualization that come along with the benefits.
On the benefits side Dan mentions the cost savings of less physical servers; increased flexibility to provision systems or change configurations; and better access to resources in the cloud. This latter benefit outsources complexity and shifts capital expenditures to operational expenditures.
You would be hard-pressed to find a large company not already leveraging some mix of hardware and software virtualization. Especially in a down economy, it has obvious value.
However, Dan then brings up the burdens of brick walls. The good news is that the number of physical servers may drop due to support cost and energy pressures. And, the potential bad news: the number of virtualized servers and devices can skyrocket without the physical constraints, and each of these virtualized devices still needs to be managed. We are seeing this all of the time in our major enterprise client engagements - virtual instances can proliferate quite rapidly if not managed carefully.
Here's another, deeper challenge of virtualization in enterprise IT: for all of those virtual servers, you still have dependencies or "wires hanging off" of those, leading to big iron mainframes, SaaS applications, 3rd party services, what have you. These dependencies are resistant to hardware virtualization, so they need to be simulated with behavioral virtualization.
I personally like to compare this phenomenon to unmarked leftovers in a shared refrigerator... [whose food is this, and without opening it up, can I figure out how long it has been here?]
Dan adds that a "whole new class of IT systems-management software and techniques is needed to create a virtual data center operating system." Part of the increased requirements for systems development and administration involves testing and continuous validation, and part of this involves better management of both VMs and Virtual Services, a topic we will discuss in further detail on this blog.
There is much more in Dan's post and I recommend going to Forbes.com to read it. I liked his concluding remark, "The upshot is that IT, which is dedicated to automating the rest of the business, must start spending more time automating itself." Well said.
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