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Further up the systems management food chain, however, the big names are more entrenched. While VMware itself sells a wide range of management tools, it acknowledges that getting customers to change their strategic systems management platform to cope with virtualisation is too big an ask.

“We want to make it so that our customers who have systems management environments [from the likes of IBM, BMC, HP or CA] don’t need to replace them to manage virtual environments, and we partner with all those companies,” explains Melinda Wilken, senior director of product marketing for VMware’s management range. Indeed, all of those are working to deliver virtualisation management toolsets.

That doesn’t mean it won’t come at a price, she says. “There are rich opportunities for more productised integrations.”

Given that an important problem is tying virtual infrastructure to applications and business functionality, Citrix’s Cosby believes that the business service management vendors, such as BMC and CA, whose tools are designed to do just that, have an important role to play. But so too do the applications manufacturers, he adds.

“SAP has developed the ability for an application workload to request information from the virtualisation layer,” Crosby explains, “so the workload knows how to scale itself.”

From a tools perspective, the Holy Grail is a single system from which one can fully manage virtual and physical environments. But while most systems management tool vendors have plug-ins for virtual systems, enabling truly flexible virtual environments requires systems management tools that interact in a fashion far closer to real time than is currently the norm.

“When you’re taking down and putting up new virtual machines on a week-to-week basis, you’ve got to keep all your management systems synched in real time, or you have a lot of problems,” explains Mary Johnson Turner, research director at IDC. “They need to be able to update and to proliferate the relevant information through the stack at a greater speed. The industry as a whole is still figuring out how to do that.”

Turner adds a familiar refrain in the systems management world: “And it is as much a process issue as a question of having the right tools.”

Role of ITIL

Fortunately for enterprise IT shops, the systems (or rather, service) management processes outlined in the industry-standard ITIL framework are sufficiently decoupled from specific technical tools to accommodate virtual environments. “The processes recommended by ITIL are all perfectly applicable to virtual environments,” says Turner.

Indeed, recent IDC research has found that greater virtualisation deployment drives organisations to apply best practice processes to their virtual environments. Nearly 80% of US organisations that have more than 50 virtual machines say they currently apply or plan to apply ITIL or other best practice process models to managing their virtual infrastructure, the survey found. Among those organisations with fewer than 50 machines, that figure was just 48%.

The ITIL processes of configuration and change management are of particular importance in virtual environments, adds Turner. Adaptivity’s Houghton agrees: “Configuration management and understanding what those virtual machines are doing is vitally important,” he says, “and if you don’t change the processes when you change your architecture, you are going to get in a lot of trouble.”

Unfortunately, for the same reason that they are important, those processes can be difficult to execute in a virtual environment. “They can start to feel a little stressed as virtualisation progresses,” says Turner.

For most organisations then, as virtualisation proliferates they will have
to step up their systems management processes, and intensify their efforts to tie those processes to business requirements.

But by the same token, if an organisation has already achieved a mature level of business service management, then virtualisation need not prove too difficult
to integrate into existing processes.

UK retailer Tesco, for example, is currently preparing to virtualise 1,500 of its servers onto 120 HP blades using Citrix’s XenServer product. But Tesco’s IT director Nick Folkes is unfazed about the management challenge associated with that product.

“We have hundreds of thousands of physical devices in our IT environment, and adding virtual machines on top of that could have caused even greater complexity,” he explains. “But we spent a good year changing our development and support processes in line with managing business processes.” That introduces a ‘layer of abstraction’ that in fact makes it simpler to manage IT effectively, he says.

But no one is losing sight of the fact that the benefits far outweigh the management overhead. At pension company Standard Life, a radical programme of systems refresh, consolidation and server virtualisation has dramatically reduced its data centre, server and energy requirements. By virtualising 70% of its Intel servers, it has been able to decommission 143 of its 400 production machines. Along with consolidating onto a small number of more powerful platforms, virtualisation has cut its occupied floor space from 1,400 sq m to 500 sq m, says Neil McPherson Standard Life’s data centre manager, and take its annual power consumption from 11 million kilowatt hours to seven million kilowatt hours – a saving of £300,000 a year in energy costs alone, says McPherson.

It is typical of the contradictory nature of virtualisation that it can simultaneously confound organisations’ ability to tie IT resources to business functionality while also allowing them to dynamically allocate those resources according to demand.

But for many, capitalising on the potential of virtualisation will require more disciplined systems management processes and additional tooling. The future is looking increasingly virtual, and those organisations that bring the new wave of virtual processes and tools on board sooner rather than later will be in the best shape to benefit from it.