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T-Systems, the IT services division of Deutsche Telekom, is a sophisticated adopter of virtualisation. The computing platform it uses to support customer systems is entirely virtualised, to improve both utilisation and flexibility of compute resources. But the increased complexity introduced by this move drove a wedge between hardware and applications, the company found.

“In traditional systems management environments, there is a close link between hardware and applications,” explains Jörn Kellerman, vice president of application line at T-Systems. “In a virtual environment there is a greater distinction between the two.

With an install base of hundreds of virtual machines, you need very sophisticated systems management tools and processes.”

One reason why it is currently difficult to manage virtual environments in a way that is tied to business functionality is the existence of a fundamental technical blind spot, according to Simon Crosby, CTO of the virtualisation and management division at Citrix. “In general, at the virtualisation layer, we get to see the virtual machines, how much memory they have, their CPU requirement etc,” he explains. “But we don’t know how the applications are performing on top of the virtual machines.”

Even at a small scale, simply adding another layer in the IT stack has increased the management workload.

Although very pleased with his virtualisation deployment that has cut the server farm from 21 machines to two, Gordon Paterson, director of information technology at trade union PCS, has found the diagnosing of problems has become more time-consuming.

“We were getting poor performance on a virtual NetWare (Novell’s ageing network operating system) machine, and it was impossible to tell whether it was a VMware problem or a Novell problem,” he recalls. “So I was spending half my time on Novell forums, and half my time on VMware ones trying to find out where the problem was. Overall, virtualisation has reduced our management overhead, but it has also increased the problem resolution time.”

Virtual blindness

But there are further dimensions of management complexity introduced by virtualisation, notably software licensing and security. In the case of licensing, virtual sprawl can mean not just software sprawl but a loss of visibility into licence compliance requirements. The challenge of keeping tabs on licence usage is not helped by the fact that some software vendors are still themselves trying to figure out how to charge customers when metrics such as CPU usage are no longer meaningful.

In the case of security, the concept of a virtual machine is as useful to hackers, saboteurs and intellectual property thieves as it is to data centre administrators. A disgruntled employee might copy a virtual machine onto a USB device and run it at home, for example, or set up a virtual machine that spreads malware throughout the entire organisation. In either case, the typical IT department would struggle to trace the employee’s actions.

Crosby reports that while there is some interesting work being done on virtual machine encryption, the field of virtual security is still immature. “One thing that scares me is the lack of a standard way to encrypt a virtual machine,” he says. “If some vendor went off and encrypted all your VMs, and you broke off the relationship, you could be locked out.”

As well as making day-to-day operations more complex, these virtualisation management challenges threaten to cap one of the more significant promises of virtualisation, namely the ability to deliver highly scalable systems.

In theory at least, if an organisation’s IT infrastructure is comprised of a large number of standardised virtual machines, as opposed to a small number of siloed systems, each with their own idiosyncratic management requirements, then it can be maintained, updated and managed with repeatable – and more importantly, automated – systems management processes, allowing it to scale.

That promises to radically lower the staffing overhead of corporate IT operations. “At Google’s highly automated data centres, there is one admin for every 20,000 machines,” explains Citrix’s Crosby. “In the typical enterprise, there are between 50 and 100 servers per admin.”

And while there is some evidence that virtualisation is already improving that ratio, the potential improvements are as yet unrealised, he says. “We haven’t seen the order-of-magnitude improvement that is needed.”

Tools and process

So how can organisations tackle these management challenges? Any technical challenge is an opportunity for the IT industry, and an ecosystem of vendors selling virtualisation management tools has arisen, especially around the VMware platform.

One such vendor is Veeam, which sells a variety of tools including backup and systems monitoring for VMware environments. For its founder and CEO Ratmir Timashev, at the tools level at least, the unique demands of virtual environments will usher in a new generation of vendors with technology specifically tailored to the virtual world.

“The laws of physics work differently in the virtual world,” he explains. “With backup, for example, in a physical environment you can upload an agent onto every machine. If you did that in the virtual world, you’d be taking up storage with redundant data. You need to do things differently.”

Timashev acknowledges, though, that the existence of these vendors is precarious. “If VMware buys one of the VM lifecycle management vendors, the other ones will go bust.”

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