subject: Virtualized Data Storage Solutions Asia: Offsetting Management Issues [print this page] Virtualization is well on its way to becoming mainstream. One of the only Asian network operations upgrades to see growth throughout the entire global financial crisis, virtualization is being deployed across large, medium and even small information-heavy organizations at a rate of knots. While the technology is advancing relatively smoothly, making constant progress and upgrades in the way it deals with issues, management issues can be more difficult to deal with.
One of the greatest challenges that virtualized companies face is the fact that where once a physical resource existed, now that resource is either greatly reduced, or eliminated altogether. Today we are looking at the fundamental procedural changes necessary in organizations with newly created virtual Asian network operations.
With a traditional physical server, there are several organizational units working independently. Under a virtualized system, IT consultants teach organizations how to come together collaboratively, just as the data has 'merged' in a physical sense. The organizational units affected may be either discrete business departments or technical domains, and unification typically means a redesign of the job descriptions, workflows, etc that were related to information management.
A move to thinking about IT resources as company-wide property is critical to the success of a virtualization project, as much as the technical expertise of the information technology infrastructure installer.
IT consultants working on Asian communications solutions in a virtualized world also frequently come across issues relating to accounting and chargeback. In companies where chargeback policies are well established, there is a shift in thinking needed to account for the change from usage of physical resources, to the usage of virtual resources. If an application does not run on a physical hardware resource, and single business applications are not deployed on their own hardware elements, how is chargeback determined? A move to usage-based chargeback seems likely - but a dedicated operations center is needed to oversee the administration.
In terms of fault management and problem isolation, a Configuration Management Database is recommended by Asian network integration specialists. This allows tracking of the additional levels of abstraction introduced by virtualization, to be done in real time. This will work together with an IT Service Catalogue that maps particular business services to the information technology infrastructure, whether virtual or physical.
This is just the beginning of planning for fault management, however. The non-static nature of virtual systems means that problems are often difficult to diagnose, and the root cause of a hardware failure can be slow to identify. Additional tools that allow CIOs to monitor and discover changes are recommended by IT consultants, including deep packet application-aware inspection tools, integrated element managers, etc.
Virtual machine responsibility is another area where changes in operational procedures seem tempting. After all, why not let the department using a particular VM be responsible for its provisioning? Yet it seems that this can make things more difficult for the technical team, rather than taking the burden off their shoulders. Asian communications solutions specialists have seen security and management costs spiral out of control due to virtual machine sprawl. Process and sound governance, as well as planning, are the remedy for this and the other organization issues around virtualization.
