Venyu Blog

To paraphrase a recent observation I found online in researching emerging IT paradigms, “technology comes into being and waits for customers to catch up with it.”

There’s a lot of truth in that statement, especially when it comes to server virtualization. Writing on CIO.com, Pam Baker makes the case that virtualization, whether it occurs at the server or at the desktop, is starting to come into its own. The “rub” is figuring out where to go virtual and where to stay physical.

Expressed in those terms the lines blur considerably. As an IT administrator are you employing virtualization to nominally reduce server sprawl? In that case, as one of the experts interviewed for Pam’s article properly concludes, “a haphazard approach without benefit of a strategic virtualization plan merely leads to more sprawl – this time in virtual machines (VMs).”

The article then goes on to suggest five places to begin your company’s migration to virtualization, including virtualizing all new applications, all QA and engineering departments, so-called “low-risk” services (such as web, print and file servers), and systems with low predicted requirements (e.g. redundant or warm-spare servers)

Maybe it goes without saying but considering how much forethought goes into technologies like virtualization, to only scrape the surface of its potential and seek out the lowest hanging fruit (e.g. combating server sprawl), is to minimize its greater impact on your network and leave it almost no better in terms of user response time than it would have been had you not invoked virtualization in the first place.