Getting Virtualization Right - Monitoring And Roi
Analyst extraordinaire, Cameron Haight conducted a session at the Gartner Data Center show on
, "After the Dust Settles: Maximizing Your Virtualization Investment".
Virtualization is easy to get into but hard to get right.
Cameron shared a not-yet-ready for prime-time virtualization maturity model which I respectfully won't share here, but beyond that he had a lot of nuggets to share for an audience that was full of no virtualization dummies. And as always, he asked some great questions.
AUDIENCE POLLS & Comments
Where is your IT organization in terms of x86-based virtualization deployment?
Still primarily in test/dev 6%
Less than 10% production virtualized 17%
Between 10 and 25% virtualized 22%
Between 26 and 50% virtualized 34%
Between 51 and 75% virtualized 11%
More than 75% virtualized 10% (wow)
[Julia's note: of course there's an element of self selection here - the people going to Cameron's session are typically those more committed to virtualization]
What application types are not yet considered candidates for virtualization within your org? (select all that apply)
Email/Collaboration 36%
ERP/CRM 38%
Databases 45%
Presentation/Terminal Servers 10%
Infrastructure Servers (i.e. active directory, dns, etc) 13%
Other 11%
From Cameron - these results are not surprising; the less mission-critical the application, the more apt it is to be virtualized.
What are the biggest issues for aggressive adoption of x86 virtualization in your organization? (select all that apply)
ROI remains unclear 8%
Organization/skills maturity 24%
Operational process development 33%
Insufficient internal/customer demand 4%
ISV licensing and/or support 17%
Management tool capabilities 23%
Senior management commitment 13%
Other 7%
None 16%
Interesting aside - Cameron asked for a show of hands for the people in the room who managed their team's virtual servers. Then asked of that group how many managed storage. Saw no hands and the guy behind me giggled. Cameron's takeaway - it's important to have a good relationship with the SAN team.
When it comes to monitoring, Cameron talked about a "Monitoring Spectrum" going beyond just cost metrics. As we know from EM7 customers, what is important is completely dependent on the audience.
Administration View - migration effectiveness, vm resource consumption, template/vm standardization, vm compliance, automated task percentage
Operations View - Opex/capex, virtualization adoption rate, FTE staffing ratios, process effectiveness, facilities efficiency (PUE)
Service View - service-level metrics, cost of service delivery, customer satisfaction, customer retention, new services offered
Business View - Cost of sales, on-time delivery, time to market, market share, asset use
Final Thoughts:
Virtualization is more than a server consolidation enabler - it can be truly transformative so make sure you know where you want to go.
Monitor the results of your virtualization initiative - make sure to attempt to link the results to key business metrics.
by: David Link
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