While virtualization gives you many advantages, it is not perfect. Many people who work in the IT field are aware of the fact that taking the time to virtualize IT will bring about a large number of benefits. It will save time and money, and there are many tools that can be purchased via numerous vendors.
Despite this, as with the introduction of any new technology, there are challenges that needs to be faced and overcome. Some of the most basic challenges that IT departments may run into is realizing that they have no idea what is inside their data centers. There may also be a lack of communication between the business and IT departments, and unexpected costs could come up.
It is always critical for you to become aware of which applications you are virtualizing, and how you are virtualizing them. Of all the challenges discussed so far, the biggest that you will likely face is attempting to enhance the expectations of the end user.
The very first thing that IT departments will want to do is take the time to scope out their systems. In 1999, a number of companies and organizations who begin making plans for date changes due to the new century panicked when they realized they did not know which applications to use. This caused a number of chain reactions which involved the analysis of assets and their discovery.
The challenges that you will face with virtualization are very similar. Before you can use virtualization successfully, it is absolutely critical that you understand your environment, and the application portfolio is included in this. There is a paradigm shift that has occurred in recent years for many enterprises, and this shift is directly connected to the IT assets. It is important for firms to ensure the business units along with IT. If they cannot you may find yourself with economies of scale when working with virtualization.
A Shift in IT Thinking
Once IT systems have become virtualized, the business units will need to request servers dependent on the importance of the application to the total business, and IT will be used for the purpose of allocating the virtual servers via the corporate server pool.
Should the business unit need a reduced amount of server space, then this means that allocating at a particular time may allow it to gain a rebate. One of the greatest challenges that IT firms will face when dealing with virtualization is costs which are unexpected. Once the server farms are scaled down, the reductions in terms of cost will be automatic.
At the same time, it will still be necessary to manage the servers, and this will require you to utilize both manpower as well as tooling, and the images will need to be refreshed each time something is added to the environment. What this clearly shows is that virtualization is by no means a panacea.
Every piece of virtualization will have its benefits, but it will also have risks as well. For instance, if you were given the ability to virtualize the systems, it is possible to save a lot of power through the consolidation of applications when are used for the purpose of running within ten servers for ten virtual machines. But this method has a number of problems which you may encounter.
First, if one of the hardware machines fail, this means that you will lose as much as ten virtual machines, and the configuration will become a lot tougher since you will have a single physical mahine that will need to access every bit of storage, as well as the networks which will be accessed by the ten virtual machines.
In addition to this, you may also run into large amounts of CPU overhead since the hypervisor is basically an OS that doesn’t take up any CPU space. But despite all this, the most important thing to keep in mind is that it will be necessary to virtualize the proper applications.
Virtualizing the Proper Applications
Not every application is good for virtualization, and even if they are, it is absolutely critical to make sure the right approach is used. What this means is that you will want to pick the proper tools from the vendors. You will have distinct software structures and distinct employment techniques, and this will make it tough for the software creators to use techniques from a single architecture on another.
It is also important to keep in mind that numerous application types may need to be deployed in a different manner. The light applications may be utilized on the virtual machine that runs with the other virtual machines, and this is for the physical box.
The heavier applications will need to be deployed for their servers, and they will either need to run on the virtual machine itself, or they may run on the operating system. The applications which are quite heavy tend to be intensive in terms of the CPU, and this means that a lot of OS calls will be made. The best examples of this are the scientific as well as the financial packages, and they must all be deployed on a sizeable number of servers. There are bottlenecks that will be encountered as well, and it is important to be capable of shifting them. One of the most common problems that one encounters is a single failure point.
