Virtualization management major concern 23 September, 2008 By Paul Weinberg

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More than 150 IT professionals in North American enterprises, 87 per cent of which had over 1,000 employees, were polled on their VMware based server virtualization deployments.

Among its findings, only 24 per cent of respondents are "very confident" that their current management tools are sufficient to maintain existing IT service levels under virtualization.

"That to me is not real surprising, in that this is still a very new market," stated Bob Laliberte, an analyst at ESG and one of the study's authors. He estimated that less than 10 per cent of enterprise servers are virtualized.

"There is a lot of push and momentum, to drive server virtualization into environments for consolidation, cost savings, power cooling and space efficiency. But obviously the management challenges are still going to be there" he continued.

For Laliberte, there is still a missing piece in the equation following the consolidation of servers and the generation of virtual machines carrying applications in the customer organizations.

"You still have that management challenge that you had before. Only now it is going to be harder because the management tools don't exist to fully cover that," Laliberte stated.

At the same time, the industry is not static, he continued. "So, we are still at the front edge, of this. There is still a lot development taking place, stuff coming out all the time, to help beef up the new companies that are being created, to fill gaps in systems for management."

Furthermore, 20 per cent of respondents have been using their VMware deployments for testing and development of applications, 39 per cent for tier one mission critical applications and another 35 for non tier one, less core applications. Tier one and tier two applications are loose terms for core and non-core enterprise applications respectively, with the exact definitions varying with every organization, stated Laliberte.

Why are some customers not yet running tier-one mission critical applications in a VMware based production environment? Respondents cited multiple reasons at the same time -- 42 per cent have performance concerns, another 40 per cent are in early stage of VMware pilots and testing and 26 per cent admitted lacking sufficient skills and training for VMware solutions inside their corporate IT departments.

Virtualization is still very young market and some users are saying that they "are still trying to figure it out," stated Laliberte.

In addition, nearly 48 per cent stated that isolating root cause problems within a tier one application production environment is "the number one challenge" for server based virtualization.

Those surveyed cited one festering issue in VMware environments -- the ability to map virtual machines to physical infrastructures, such as servers and applications, storage management, virtual security, and application performance monitoring.

Meanwhile, close to 60 per cent of respondents told ESG they will be deploying storage virtualization technologies in conjunction with their VMware server virtualization deployment over the next 12 months, particularly in block-based virtualization and thin provisioning.

"We are starting to see a correlation between server virtualization and storage virtualization," stated Laliberte.