WHITE P APER

Successful Datacenter Virtualization Depends on

Comprehensive Management Solutions
Sponsored by: VMware

Mary Johnston Turner

May 2009

IDC OPINION
www.idc.com

Virtualization is increasingly being deployed in large-scale production datacenters to

enable more agile business processes and more efficient use of IT resources. As the
total number of virtual machines (VMs) and the density of VMs per physical server
increase, IT managers are quickly finding that virtual machine management needs to
F.508.935.4015

extend beyond configuration automation to encompass application performance

monitoring, dynamic capacity planning, and automated change and compliance
management. Vendors such as VMware are rapidly expanding their virtual machine
management portfolio to help IT managers keep up with these escalating
requirements.
P.508.872.8200

IN THIS WHITE P APER

This white paper describes the impact that virtual machine implementations have on
Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA

datacenter management requirements and outlines the major types of functions IT

managers need to support in order to run virtual environments efficiently while
maintaining required business service levels. The paper concludes by discussing how
VMware is extending and enhancing its management capabilities to address these
important emerging requirements.

SITUATION OVERVIEW
Increasing business expectations and the demand for IT organizations to deliver high-
quality services with limited headcounts dictate that senior IT leaders improve
productivity from existing staff and "do more with less." Business managers now
expect IT to meet or exceed their demands quickly in areas such as improving time to
market, ensuring compliance, providing disaster recovery, and increasing competitive
advantage.

IT organizations are making the choice to deploy virtualization in order to constrain

capital costs associated with the growth of physical servers and to support more
flexible business environments where shared, pooled datacenter resources can be
assigned as needed to a variety of applications and workloads. IDC expects the pace
of virtual machine implementation to accelerate over the next several years as many
organizations increase the number of VMs deployed per machine and scale up the
use of virtualization to support a wider range of mission-critical application workloads.
To the surprise of many IT managers, however, traditional change management,
configuration management, performance management, and capacity planning tools
and processes are not sufficient to address the system management needs of large-
scale virtual environments for a number of reasons, including:

ִ The sheer number of rapid changes to configuration items, crumb trails, and
dependency maps exceeds the capabilities of tools and processes designed for
more static environments.

ִ The growth and frequency of requests to set up and tear down VMs overwhelm
change boards and processes used to coordinate provisioning across server,
storage, and network teams.

ִ Service desk and problem/incident management processes need visibility into

VMs' performance and resource allocation in real time in order to address
service-level problems reported by end users.

IDC's research finds that virtual machine management is becoming an increasing

priority for datacenter managers. Effective, scaled-up virtual server management
requires tools and processes designed to accommodate frequent change. These
tools must be able to replicate and automate standardized processes and integrate
management workflows across multivendor physical and virtual environments. The
larger the organization's virtualization deployment, the more important comprehensive
virtualization management becomes to achieving the organization's business goals.

In a recent IDC survey, over half (56%) of organizations that have implemented more
than 50 VMs reported that the management of their virtual environment is very
important to achieving their business goals, compared with just 24% of organizations
with smaller implementations that feel the same way (see Figure 1). As the scope and
scale of virtual environments increase, the need for effective management strategies
becomes more evident.

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FIGURE 1

Importance of Virtual Environment Management to Reaching

Organization's Business Goals

Very important

Somewhat important

Not
important/undecided

0 10 20 30 40 50 60
(% of respondents)

51 or more VMs (n = 54)

50 or fewer VMs (n = 46)

Source: IDC's Virtual Infrastructure Management Survey, 2009

Comprehensive Management Environment

Critical to Effective Large-Scale Virtual
Datacenter Operations

To keep up with the pace of change required by larger-scale virtual machine

implementations, IT decision makers can take a lesson from the development of
physical datacenter management solutions over two decades. In the mainframe era,
systems management was largely focused on job scheduling and the allocation of
expensive computing resources within the mainframe. With the advent of distributed
computing and the proliferation of the number of machines needing to be managed,
datacenter management strategies expanded to address a much wider array of tasks,
including discovery, performance monitoring, root cause analysis, and capacity
planning. More recently, IT management solutions have expanded to encompass
system provisioning, workflow automation, and patch management. With the
emergence of production-scale virtualized infrastructure environments, IT teams are
identifying a new set of management requirements that are necessary to keep
business services up and running across rapidly changing virtual environments (see
Figure 2).

©2009 IDC #218361 3

FIGURE 2

Evolution of Datacenter Architectures and Management

Requirements

Mainframe Distributed Virtualization

1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2008+

Run-book VM provisioning
automation
Compliance
Configuration
Performance management
Discovery
Capacity planning
Root cause Service
analysis mapping Disaster recovery
ITIL
Mainframe Job Patch Automation
scheduling
virtualization Provisioning Physical/virtual
CMDBs management
Event integration

Source: IDC, 2009

Effective management of larger-scale virtualized infrastructure environments requires

tools that have been designed to accommodate the unique nature of virtualized
architectures and can recognize the rapid movement of workloads on the fly. With
respect to production-scale virtual machine management, many IT organizations are
quickly recognizing the need for virtualization-aware capabilities in the following
areas:

ִ Automated provisioning

ִ Disaster recovery

ִ Dynamic configuration and change control

ִ Compliance

ִ Capacity planning

ִ Application performance monitoring

ִ Root cause analysis

ִ Chargeback

ִ Integration with physical system management systems and processes

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In the case of provisioning and disaster recovery, this means that tools and processes
must be able to rapidly discover resources, implement approved configurations, and
dynamically maintain approved software and hardware profiles. IT teams need to be
able to quickly evaluate utilization and conduct capacity planning in an environment
where resource allocations are adjusted frequently, and they need to be able to
evaluate how changes in VM configurations and resource allocations impact the end-to-
end performance of mission-critical applications. They also need to be able to document
compliance with change control guidelines and approved configuration profiles.

Root cause and dependency analysis becomes critical in heavily virtualized

environments. The interaction of hardware, VMs, databases, and applications makes
diagnosing end-user performance problems critical to meeting quality of service SLAs. If
the root cause of a problem is associated with lack of capacity, virtualization can enable
immediate remediation by adding more resources to affected VMs or even deploying
new application instances. Tools that can look across physical and virtual systems are
critical to isolating and resolving root cause quickly.

IDC's research shows that more CIOs are demanding tighter coordination and
integration of virtual system and physical system management processes and tools.
These decision makers understand that integration and automation of workflows,
CMDBs, and policies are necessary in order to realize the cost-saving promises of
virtualization on a broad scale. By deploying a set of coordinated, comprehensive
operations management, monitoring, and planning tools across the virtualized
datacenter, IT teams are able to increase staff productivity, reduce the amount of time
spent on routine tasks, and ensure that end-to-end service levels are maintained.

FUTURE OUTLOOK
The number and density of virtual servers deployed across development and
production environments will continue to increase dramatically over the next several
years. In order to hold down IT staffing and support costs while keeping up with the
expected growth of these operationally complex virtualized datacenters, IT managers
need to implement a comprehensive virtualization management environment.

To ensure a successful role out of these tools, IT teams will need to recognize how
virtualization alters system management process requirements with regard to the
design of operational workflows and the speed at which decisions must be
implemented. IT organizations will find that virtualization changes many aspects of
their day-to-day environment. In particular, it significantly increases the importance of
using well-defined management best practice processes and business-driven policies
to control the environment.

IDC recommends that IT organizations take the following steps when they begin to
design and implement comprehensive virtual machine management strategies:

ִ Take an incremental approach. IT staff should consider existing manual tasks

that can be standardized and simplified using the full range of available tools and
then map out an implementation plan that proves the value of the tools and
provides a model for understanding organizational and workflow impacts.

©2009 IDC #218361 5

ִ Look to leverage automation. For most IT organizations, virtualization is being
rolled out across server, storage, desktop, and application teams in various
stages. Automation of many management functions at each layer offers each
team opportunities to standardize processes and realize cost savings from more
efficient operations.

ִ Plan and budget for comprehensive management from the start. IT should
plan for the use of comprehensive management tools from the onset of any
virtualization project and should build in a solid budget for both tools and training.

ִ Integrate with existing management solutions and processes when

possible. Virtual machine management tools and processes should integrate
with existing management solutions whenever possible in order to streamline
operations and ensure tight coordination across all hardware and software tiers.

ִ Measure and monitor success. IT should look at tactical outcomes and

measure cost savings and ROI incrementally while also creating a longer-term
strategy that recognizes the collective benefit from better integrating and
automating a wide range of physical and virtual management activities.

Managing virtualized infrastructure on a broad scale requires IT decision makers to

apply the same disciplines and best practices to the design, implementation, and
operation of their virtual environment that they apply to their physical environment.
IDC believes these types of mature virtualization management environments are
required to fully move virtual machine technologies into broad-based production
datacenters.

VMW ARE'S APPRO ACH

During the past several years, VMware's core virtual machine hypervisor capabilities
have matured to support a range of automatic migration and configuration
management capabilities. The launch of the VMware vSphere 4 environment adds
more built-in visibility across application, network, storage, and server resources.

For customers looking to scale up use of virtual machines across their production
datacenters, VMware is rapidly extending its portfolio of management tools to provide
a full, comprehensive suite. Collectively, these tools are branded with the VMware
vCenter logo. Currently available products include:

ִ vCenter Server provides a centralized interface to the full range of vCenter

management tools using wizard-driven templates and to support task scheduling
and alerting.

ִ vCenter Server Heartbeat protects the vCenter Server and its database against
hardware, operating system, application, and network downtime.

ִ vCenter Site Recovery Manager maintains and applies predefined templates

and profiles as needed to restore VMs and required configurations.

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ִ vCenter Lab Manager provides self-service provisioning of multi-VM
environments for use in application development and test labs as well as release
management scenarios.

ִ vCenter Lifecycle Manager automates the management of the VM lifecycle

workflows, from request to approval to decommissioning.

ִ vCenter Orchestrator provides out-of-the-box workflows that can help

administrators automate over 800 manual virtual machine management tasks. A
workflow library provides blueprints for creating and customizing additional
workflows.

Throughout 2009 VMware plans to continue to extend the vCenter portfolio to

address requirements around application performance monitoring and capacity
planning. Products that will be available in 2009 include:

ִ vCenter AppSpeed will provide performance management and service-level

reporting for applications running within virtual machines. It will supply
administrators with visibility into multitier application performance, usage, and
dependencies across virtual and physical infrastructure.

ִ vCenter ConfigControl will add additional configuration, dependency, and

compliance discovery capabilities and allow administrators to search, model,
visualize, and compare historic and real-time data.

ִ vCenter CapacityIQ will enable real-time capacity planning and what-if impact
analysis to help administrators better utilize resources and avoid overprovisioning
or underprovisioning of VMs.

ִ vCenter Chargeback will help administrators better understand the cost of VMs
and allocate those costs appropriately across the organization.

When VMware completes the rollout of its full management suite, the firm will have
completed an extremely important transition from upstart technology provider to core
datacenter infrastructure vendor. By providing customers with a comprehensive
management suite, VMware will enable large-scale virtualized datacenters to continue
to expand cost-effectively while maintaining mission-critical application workload SLAs.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

However, to fully realize the benefits of these virtual machine technologies, IT
managers need to invest in comprehensive management tools, policies, and
processes that will enable them to operate these complex environments cost-
effectively at high levels of service.

IDC's research indicates that many organizations are reluctant to invest in

sophisticated virtualization management tools because they are concerned about
possible disruptions to existing management processes. They also worry that their
IT staff members do not have sufficient skills or time to take advantage of the tools'
capabilities.

©2009 IDC #218361 7

In smaller-scale virtualized environments, where change is relatively infrequent, many
organizations can get by with limited, mostly manual management capabilities that
are isolated from the broader datacenter operations environment. However, as the
scale of virtual machine deployments increases, many IT administrators struggle to
keep up with operational requirements. CIOs find they need to assign more staff to
manage the constant change inherent in a large-scale virtual environment, yet the
organization still experiences lengthy delays when it comes to provisioning new
resources or troubleshooting performance problems. Poorly managed virtual machine
environments are also likely to suffer from VM sprawl where VMs go unused and
consume resources that could otherwise be assigned to new workloads.

Without sufficiently mature management tools and processes, the cost of added staff,
inefficient hardware utilization, and unexpected downtime can substantially decrease
the expected ROI. To drive virtualization deep into the core of enterprise-class
datacenters, VMware will be challenged to educate customers about how critical
these state-of-the-art management capabilities are to the successful operation of
large-scale virtualized datacenters. VMware needs to help educate VM administrators
about the value of these tools and help motivate investments in training so that the
tools can be used effectively.

VMware will also be challenged to help customers do a better job of integrating its
virtual machine management tools into broader datacenter operations environments
and to accommodate what are expected to be increasingly heterogeneous virtual
server environments. As virtualization becomes more mainstream, CIOs will expect
the same staff members to manage the full range of physical and virtual servers that
are deployed across the datacenter.

CONCLUSION
Virtualization enables IT organizations to implement more agile infrastructure
environments by decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware and
operating system. However, in large-scale deployments, virtualization can also create
many new operational complexities that require IT teams to rethink workflows and
deploy new, virtual machine–aware management tools. The successful ramp-up of
large-scale virtual infrastructure environments is highly dependent on the use of
comprehensive management tools and processes that are fully aware of the unique
capabilities and challenges created by virtualization technologies.

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