Quoting from CMP net.asia

Managing virtualization technology requires IT to grapple with some unique challenges. BMC's David Wagner discusses the solutions at hand.

Virtualization is nothing new. Companies have been using the technology for decades in mainframe and proprietary environments but a confluence of cost factors and recent technology developments are compelling businesses to put the technology to work in other environments. David Wagner, BMC director of solution marketing for capacity management and provisioning spoke with Systems Management Pipeline (SMP) Editor Amy Larsen DeCarlo about server virtualization in the enterprise today and some of the management challenges associated with it.

SMP: Can you set the stage and tell me some of the reasons why there is so much more development attention and customer interest in virtualization now?

WAGNER: What I think is really going on here is the technology enablement is happening at the same time as companies are under incredible business and IT cost pressures. You put all of this together and there is this perfect storm forcing people to really look at doing IT in a different way. Proprietary Unixes like AIX, Solaris, HP-UX implemented virtualization 3 or 4 years ago and it was adopted very slowly and gradually for high-end architectures, very expensive hardware typically used for large-scale database applications. Virtualization in the distributed world got its start there but what really has made it explode were two major phenomena.

One was VMWare being first out of the shoot to create, and I don't mean this in the negative sense, really a down-market version of virtualization that made it accessible from a cost standpoint. What we saw was in the last two or three years, people playing with virtualization on industry-standard servers primarily in their development organizations. Development groups run more applications on the same set of hardware at the same time which of course is a good thing from a cost standpoint.

In the last two years especially, Intel and AMD in the x86 market continued the acceleration of ever-more compute power on the chip. They moved to dual core architectures and now they are putting hooks for virtualization technology and hypervisors directly in the hardware itself.

The other major driver was these blade and rack mount servers with their ever-increasing power are using more and more things like electricity, floor space, and cooling. All of these ancillary costs are turning out to be substantially higher than the cost of the server itself. All of these things came together in the last year or so. Frankly the virtualization technology in the minds of most operations directors and application developers is proven enough that it is now safe and cool to deploy. I think we have now crossed over that technology chasm and that is why everyone is talking about it and everyone is doing it.

SMP: For all of the advantages of virtualization, it is not necessarily the simplest thing to manage. Are IT staffs aware of the challenges they are going to face with respect to management and can you outline what those challenges are?

WAGNER: Sure. As with any organization, I think there is going to be a wide spectrum here. There are IT organizations that are very aware of the challenges of the management and there are those at the other end of the spectrum that think of virtualization as just another platform to manage. I think the ones that think of that way are doing themselves a disservice because there are some unique risks associated with virtualized environments that don't exist in the physical environment or are at least not as significant.

I would classify these risks in really two main categories. One is all the risks associated with change. The whole reason there are risks associated with change is because when you make changes you need to know, what the current state is, so that if and when problems do occur, you can revert back to the point before the change is made or you can inform the right people so that they can use tools to diagnose the problem based on the knowledge of what the current configuration is. The unique thing about virtualized environments is the environment's configuration itself is changing over time. So in virtual environments, you have applications that might be running on one physical machine one day and another one another day -- or one virtual machine (VM) here or VMs are brought in and out service.

This is a whole new paradigm and it creates a whole new set of availability risks and downstream management challenges.

The other major bucket associated with virtualization challenges is one that simply does not exist in isolated physical environments -- capacity risk. If you previously had an environment where you had two different applications running on two different physical servers you could be pretty well certain they weren't going to cause problems for each other from a performance standpoint because they had their own resources. If one application required 30 percent of CPU at 9:30 in the morning to meet response time guarantees, it could because it had its own dedicated physical box. And if the other one needed 40 percent at 9:30 in the morning, that was fine. But if you combine them both and they are both running on a shared hardware platform in two separate virtual machines, if they both need access to the same physical resource at the same time, by definition one of them is going to have to wait so that is a new risk that didn't exist previously.

So previously, the capacity risk of industry standard architectures was really a cost issue. You just threw more hardware at it and knew that risk was solved. But throwing more hardware at it here doesn't solve the problem because now you are making things share resources that didn't used to, so now you need to plan for that.

SMP: What do you see as BMC's primary differentiators in the virtualization management space?

WAGNER: There are a lot of solutions that can automate the technology. And there is a whole other set that can help with process management - discovering your environment and keeping the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) up to date. Where we see ourselves as being unique is we are the only management vendor that offers an integrated approach to automate both the technology and the process management sides of the equation.

Read the entire interview, here.