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The proliferation of virtualisation in the data centre has created a daunting systems management challenge that threatens the technology’s proven benefits

It is the single clearest success story in enterprise IT in the past five years. The virtualising of servers – specifically, those based on the x86 architecture – has been as close to a magic bullet as one would dare imagine in IT.

By liberating the logical image of a server from the hardware on which it runs and so allowing multiple servers to run on a single piece of kit, the near-criminal under-utilisation of data-centre computing resources that was standard across the industry has been relieved – almost overnight.

The explosion in the popularity of server virtualisation is all too evident among the Information Age readership. Over the last two years, in its annual Effective IT survey, the proportion of readers who have adopted virtualisation has surged from 35% to 56%. In both years, over 75% of adopters described server virtualisation as either ‘effective’ or ‘very effective’, making it arguably the single best technology investment they have made this decade.

But if there is a complaint to be made about server virtualisation, it is that is has been too successful. Virtualisation has added a new conceptual layer to the enterprise IT stack, a layer that has its own rules. Indeed, the biggest names in virtualisation are making credible claims that the virtual layer may become the new operating platform for corporate IT.

That has introduced a fresh set of issues into the IT department’s already sizeable systems management workload. Given the ease with which virtual servers can be created, it is not unusual for companies to have thousands of virtual servers now spread across their hundreds of physical machines.

But those virtual environments introduce unique problems to the IT infrastructure, and they also demand new approaches to familiar problems. As an organisation’s use of virtualisation matures, the requirement for virtualisation management tools and for greater discipline in systems management processes also increase correspondingly.

Those IT organisations that successfully evolve their systems management capabilities to effectively manage virtualised environments will see the promised benefits of efficiency, flexibility and scalability become reality. Those that don’t, meanwhile, will soon find those benefits gravely threatened by complexity and by poor visibility into the IT infrastructure.

Server sprawl

The most common virtualisation management issue, and for most organisations the first sign that all is not necessarily going to be plain sailing with virtualisation, is ‘virtual sprawl’. When servers can be provisioned at the click of a button, unconstrained by physical realities, the number of virtual machines in a given environment can quickly get out of hand.

According to a survey published this year by IT consultancy Morse, 67% of IT directors at large organisations did not know how many virtual machines existed in their environment, despite the fact that 56% reported having a system for tracking them.

Information Age has heard of one large technology company which found that it had deployed around 5,000 virtual machines, fewer than half of which were doing anything useful. It is not an atypical predicament, and is one that jeopardises the very efficiency benefits that most organisations have used to justify investment in virtualisation.

“Unused machines take up a lot of space,” explains Jim Houghton, CTO and founder of Adaptivity, an IT consultancy that specialises in flexible computing platforms. “One of the problems companies see is the proliferation of redundant data. You may be improving CPU and storage utilisation, but in reality it may be less efficient than you think, because you will have all these virtual machines that are not doing anything useful.”

But the threat of unchecked virtual complexity is not simply a matter of limited efficiency. Perhaps more importantly, that complexity blurs the connection between computing resources and the applications and business processes that rely on them. Understanding that connection is vital if an IT department is to manage its resources according to business priorities.

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