Companies that use
virtualised datacentres must employ strategies and tools to
manage them if they are to deliver savings, said a Forrester
Research analyst last week.
Speaking at the Forrester IT Forum in Edinburgh, principal
consultant Rüdiger Krojnewski said that 23% of European firms are
using
server virtualisation, and an additional 12% are piloting the
process as a means of reducing costs.
"Virtualisation is not just for test systems anymore. Its use is
moving from running non-critical systems, to application in
frontline client-facing systems. However, server virtualisation
requires new thinking and new ways of being managed," he said.
Krojnewski said that while
virtual machines can be cheaper to run, they increase the
complexity of management, since each virtual machine is still an
endpoint. He said current system management tools for virtual
servers were not fully developed, and many users were unaware of
the need for them.
"Virtual servers have different management needs and have
capabilities that many traditional tools cannot cope with. They can
disappear by being suspended or be deleted entirely, and they can
move around and assume new physical addresses," said
Krojnewski.
As a result, Krojnewski said some existing classes of tools need
to become more compatible with virtual machines in areas such as
configuration management and patching back up and recovery and
monitoring and clustering.
For organisations looking to develop their competency in
managing virtualisation, Krojnewski recommended starting out with
smaller deployments first. Larger roll outs of virtualisation
should be coupled with a server consolidation strategy.
"Do not put virutal machine management into a silo of its own.
Bring server, storage, and network administrators up to speed on it
and delegate management tasks to the appropriate domain
specialist," Krojnewski said.
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