Virtualisation's unfolding complexity

21 January 2009 Pete Swabey

Virtualisation entered its difficult second year of mainstream adoption in 2008, but the fundamental benefits it offers remain unchanged

The year 2008 was when virtualisation proved itself an indispensable part of any modern IT infrastructure.

Adoption of virtualisation technologies – in its many guises – gained pace, according to the Effective IT Survey 2009.

The number of respondents who have embraced server virtualisation – its most common form – was up from 46.6% in 2008 to 56.1% in 2009. For storage virtualisation, adoption rose from 31.4% to 43.5% year on year.

Effectiveness ratings were largely unchanged, with the number of respondents describing each of the above strategies as either “effective” or “very effective”, staying around 80% in both cases.

The latest survey saw the introduction of desktop virtualisation to the list of strategies for the first time. Use of that approach is still fairly low at this stage, with 31.1% adopting it, but a further 21.7% said they planned to adopt it in the next 12 months – a comparatively high proportion in a year when new initiatives are likely to be few and far between.

Taken alone, these figures paint a picture of steady progress and broad contentment among virtualisation adopters. But virtualisation, true to its nature, is a complex and contradictory beast.

In 2008, the technology saw not only growing adoption but also industry upheaval, mounting complexity and, worst of all, the growing realisation that virtualisation’s key promise – dramatic reduction in IT costs – is not quite as easy to achieve as first envisaged.

Virtual upheaval

That all was not well in the virtualisation domain was made abundantly clear in July 2008, when VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene – the woman who had taken the company from niche provider to Wall Street darling – unexpectedly and unceremoniously left.

The reason for Greene’s departure was the topic of heated debate, but there was a hint at what was troubling its parent company, information infrastructure giant EMC, in the selection of Greene’s successor.

Before establishing a cloud computing start-up that went on to be acquired by EMC, Paul Maritz spent 14 years working for Microsoft. That company’s entrance into the market, with the release of its Hyper-V hypervisor, represented the first serious challenge to VMware’s then-undisputed place on the virtualisation throne. Maritz’s appointment seemed to suggest that VMware had sought out a leader who could take on Microsoft at its own game.

But the release of Hyper-V is just one way in which the field of virtualisation has become more complex in the last year. As the number of applications, operating systems and platforms that can be virtualised increases, so too do the number of choices an organisation must make in planning their virtual environment and the complexity involved in managing that environment.

And that complexity is beginning to threaten the cost benefits of virtualisation, as a piece of reader research conducted by Information Age in September 2008 suggests.
Overall, respondents in that survey were overwhelmingly positive about their experience of server virtualisation. Just over 61% of adopters reported that the technology had met their return-on-investment expectations in most, but not all, areas. A little over a quarter reported that it had met all their expectations.

Another finding was that 68% of respondents had applied server virtualisation to line-of-business systems, signalling that the graduation of virtualisation out of test systems into the limelight is all but complete.

But respondents also reported a litany of difficulties encountered with virtualisation. Software licensing has been complicated by virtualisation, as vendors struggle to adapt to the new model of deployment. Managing environments based on more than one virtualisation platform is beyond the capability of most existing systems management tools. Applications running on virtual platforms may encounter previously unheard-of performance issues. Backup across multiple virtual environments was also more complex to manage and execute.

These complaints and more are tipping the balance of IT expenditure away from hardware costs and into management overheads. According to Bob Beauchamp, CEO of systems management tool vendor BMC, this is precipitating a shift in organisations’ IT management requirements.

“There is a realisation that the management architectures that were built for the client/server era – the OpenViews, Tivolis, BMC Patrols and Unicenters of this arena – were never designed for the kind of objects they need to manage in a virtual world,” he told Information Age. “With virtualisation, the scale just explodes.”

But what that may mean in practice, despite the fact that virtualisation is arguably the IT department’s most powerful cost reduction tool, is that budget squeezes may still constrain the degree to which it can be implemented because of the cost of refreshing management software.

Another headache on the horizon for IT departments is the security impact of virtualisation. The hypervisor, which in virtual environments sits between the operating system and the hardware, is a new and often poorly understood addition to the IT infrastructure, and one that is privy to core systems data. That represents a potential weak spot in IT’s data defences.

Fortunately, that is a vulnerability that virtualisation vendors are now helping organisations to plug. In the first half of 2008 VMware, for example, launched its own VMsafe tools which allow administrators to monitor all transactions handled by the hypervisor.

“They are doing absolutely the right thing,” Nick Lowe, European MD of security vendor CheckPoint told Information Age, “allowing the industry to build tools for protecting virtual environments before [virtual security] becomes a serious problem.”

An easy sell

These concerns may temper but are unlikely to extinguish IT’s enthusiasm for the panacea of virtualisation. The technology is already spreading from its starting point in server and storage optimisation into an ever-increasing variety of areas. Disaster recovery, for example, is predicted by some to be the next field of IT to undergo a virtual revolution.

And according to IT market watchers IDC, this year interest in desktop virtualisation will pick up significantly. “2009 will be a developmental year for desktop virtualisation technology with lots of pilot activity. From 2010 we'll see the technology begin to enter the mainstream,” says Matthew McCormack, a consultant at IDC’s European Systems Group.

If cost-cutting was important in 2008, it will be vital in 2009. That explains why virtualisation topped Gartner’s list of CIO priorities for the year. But perhaps more importantly, it is an IT initiative in which the business can see a clear benefit.
A business director from an insurance company, one of many attendees at Information Age’s roundtable debates, explained why virtualisation was for him such an effective technology strategy.

“In decades of IT investment, the expense ratio of the industry has not markedly decreased,” he explained. “Improving efficiency using IT more intelligently is long overdue.”