Venyu Blog

“Managing Virtualized Applications: Optimizing Dynamic Infrastructures” is an Aberdeen Research report recently released that outlines a four step process to virtualization success.

Dick Csaplar, a senior research analyst who authored the report, surveyed 85 organizations about their virtualization deployments, including questions around virtualization strategies, challenges and business and operational benefits.

As reported by Beth Schultz in this Network World article, respondents to the survey experienced a 38% reduction in application downtime since deploying server virtualization —the cumulative result, suggests Csaplar, of taking the following steps:

1. Surround the application with the right business processes and measurement tools to really know what you’re doing. In other words, first define what success means, and then you can measure performance against it.
2. Collect the data. Make sure you understand what’s going on inside of your infrastructure and that you’re capturing the right level of data so if something happens you catch that and it just doesn’t go on without you being aware of it.
3. Prepare for dynamic optimization by planning for the eventuality of this server or that network segment going down or losing that storage device. Walk through the what-if scenarios of planning incidents in the data center.
4. Reap the rewards. Be able to empower software to do what you need because you know what it’s supposed to do, when it’s supposed to do it and it has the data to trigger corrective actions.

In other words, you’re not going to get to step four without fully addressing the first three steps.

“We’re at the point now as the data center is becoming more virtualized than not, that you have the opportunity to do things that you’ve never done before, like consolidate applications at night — you roll your applications that aren’t being used much during those hours onto just a few servers and power down the others for energy savings,” said Csaplar. “You need to be able to trust your management software to take actions automatically.”

What do you think…is Csaplar right. Are there any other steps you have taken to make virtualization a success in your environment?