Four Challenges of Virtualization

 This blog was also published by CIO.com:http://advice.cio.com/solstice_consulting/10197/four_challenges_of_virtualization

Imagine this, as a developer; to procure your virtual machine, you simply visit a company portal, click on a few buttons to define the CPU, memory, disk capacity, and VM image, click submit and voila…within minutes, these resources are deployed to you and you’re off on your merry way developing the next cool and exciting application.

Many organizations have grasped the concept of virtualization, the idea of decoupling the software from the hardware on which it runs. In fact, this process is starting to become mainstream. However, virtualization has also introduced its own set of challenges that have IT managers searching for answers.

Skills & Training

For some organizations, securing resources that possess the adequate skill set to create and administer virtualized servers is a challenge. Virtualization provides the ability to rapidly deploy servers into an environment however, getting resources trained and confident with virtualization skills isn’t moving at the same pace. In most cases, organizations don’t have the funding to train and maintain the staff needed to support their virtual environment.

Support & Manageability

Support and manageability of a virtualized environment are other challenges that organizations face. Companies are weary of application vendors who are still not willing to support applications that sit on a virtualized environment causing support teams to maintain a physical machine (a P2V migration)…”just in case”. Specific marketing strategies or technical limitations are two reasons why vendors are toying with the idea of taking responsibility.

Internally, organizations are also faced with these issues. Proper monitoring and support tools need to be in place to allow system admins to track performance, and monitor and report on every aspect of a virtual machine. As the virtual environment continues to grow, the ability to streamline the provisioning, configuring and patching processes are essential to the ease of support and manageability of a virtual environment.

Software Licensing

Traditional licensing models have a one to one relationship...that is, one operating system on one physical machine which makes estimating fairly straight forward. However in the virtual world, the physical machine is split into multiple “virtual” computers that can be deployed or decommissioned in minutes. The challenge is in determining where to draw the line. Should the ability to rapidly deploy or eliminate VM’s directly impact a vendor’s revenue model? This is where customers and software vendors are playing a game of tug of war.

Performance & Scalability

One of the beauties of virtualization is to be able to deploy a large number of virtual machines on a single physical machine. As newer multi-core CPUs become available, the other physical resources in each virtualization host are not expected to grow at the same pace. Limited network or memory bandwidth significantly impacts the scalability and performance of the virtual infrastructure. Apart from cores, each virtual machine presents the need for individual software packages such as anti-virus, to add further demand on the physical resources.

As advances in technology continue to take place, organizations will be introduced new challenges. When planning your virtualization road map take these challenges into account and plan ahead to have a strategy in place to confront them.