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March 10, 2008
Virtual Management, Virtual Mess
The Need for a Service Perspective before Implementing Virtualization
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Despite hand-wringing over the economy, budget forecasts for virtualization tools are on the rise. A recent UBS poll found that in 2008, a majority of CIOs plan to increase spending on virtualization by between 6 percent and 14 percent, which contrasts with overall IT budgets that respondents said would increase anywhere from zero percent and 5 percent. A CIO Insight survey recently went a step further and found that spending on virtualization for servers and storage is expected to grow more than 20 percent in 2008. What's more, the data isn't just limited to forecasts: at the Fall 2007 Gartner Symposium & ITXpo, an informal session poll with perhaps several hundred in the audience found that upward of 60 percent of IT organizations have virtualized servers in production.
What's Driving Growth?
Server consolidation is often cited as one key driver for virtualization growth. Given IT budget woes, space issues, power consumption and green IT initiatives, consolidation sounds like a logical solution -- and virtualization a means to achieve that end. Still, opportunities rarely come without costs and, in one sense, the idea that virtualization leads to consolidation might be misleading.
Forester analyst Galan Schrek pointed out in a research note last fall that virtual servers "act just like their physical counterparts, except that they exist only in software. Because they exist in software they can be created at the click of a button." This is cause for concern because while it's true that virtualization enables physical servers to be consolidated, the speed and ease in which new virtual machines can be created also means they could multiply -- like water spilled on Gremlins. In fact, a social networking company indicated it already had 15,000 servers and was growing at 6 percent a week, which was partly attributable to virtualization.
Despite these concerns, there are many advantages that make virtualization attractive. A well-managed virtualization strategy will provide a high degree of flexibility to those managing the infrastructure in areas such as capacity management and disaster recovery. However, absent a service-based model of the enterprise, virtualization might also prove an IT management nightmare, growing components like weeds and buttressing the silos of data that IT operations endeavor to integrate.
Physical devices such as servers provide a natural and unavoidable system of checks and balances for restraining the growth of IT infrastructure: a budget. New hardware purchases must be justified, which might entail an inventory of existing assets, the manner in which those assets are deployed and the capacity at which they are utilized. In other words, the business case required to purchase physical infrastructure components may not apply in a virtual environment. As Forrester's Schrek notes, virtualization enables IT "to build ever more complex systems and applications with a minimum of new effort."
Virtual Mess
Virtualization might be compared to a desert mirage that has even got some experts confused. For example, one industry pundit stated that "the layers of abstraction virtualization enables" would help eliminate the "dense spiderwebs" of dependencies between IT components within the IT infrastructure. The analogy is accurate insofar as interdependencies are concerned, but the IT infrastructure is not comprised of multiple webs. Rather, it is comprised of multiple spiders spinning up simultaneous changes on a single -- and perhaps modular and asymmetrical -- web. It is the latter that presents the management challenge.
Why is this problematic? Because enterprises struggle with understanding how IT components map to corresponding applications and services, which makes problem diagnosis difficult and labor-intensive. For example, the company that finds it takes a 35-person conference call to resolve IT outages, or the IT operations staffer who sees his console filled with dozens of severity-1 alerts and can only guess which one should be addressed first. For most, the task is as painful as isolating the lone burned-out bulb on the string of old-fashioned Christmas tree lights. If it seems daunting to isolate the root cause of issues amid 5,000 physical servers, then 10,000 virtual machines (which virtualization can provide at the click of a mouse) might be insurmountable.
While virtualization will simplify some aspects of IT management, it may also add to the complexity. Therefore, it represents a double-edged sword. As Gartner analyst Milind Govekar said in a Financial Times article, "[I]f you virtualise [sic] a mess you'll get a bigger mess. The overriding need is to cut complexity first."
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