Quoting TechWorld

If you run a virtualized environment, you are better off using a single vendor's technology. Even so, you probably can't measure your return on investment anyway, according to a recent survey.

Virtual server sprawl, lack of visibility and reporting, and an inability to measure return on investment are hampering users, according to a double-blind survey commissioned by software vendor CA Inc. and carried out by The Strategic Counsel, a research company in Toronto. The survey covered 808 organizations with 500 or more employees in the Asia-Pacific region, North America and Europe, all of which are adopting virtualization.

Respondents could not say whether their deployment was a success, because they could not quantify ROI.

A big majority -- 71% -- is deploying multiple server virtualization technologies, including operating system and hardware virtualization, operating system partitioning, paravirtualization and/or clustering.

Findings include:

-- Most organizations have more than one server virtualization environment.

-- Server sprawl, increased administration, reporting troubles, multiple skill sets and the lack of a single management view were all hindering users.

-- Companies that carried out an inventory and consolidated their physical servers got more out of virtualization.

Outfits using multiple technologies to virtualize are suffering, according to Warren Shiau, the report's author. They are 75% more likely to complain about higher administrative workloads than those who stuck with one technology, 66% more likely to complain of higher configuration requirements, 50% more likely to suffer server sprawl and 47% more likely to have reporting troubles.

Companies are deploying virtualization to improve utilization reliability and uptime, according to the survey, but they have no idea whether it is working because of the difficulty measuring the performance of the virtualized environment.

In the study, 30% of respondents were from North America, 37% were from Europe and 31% were from the Asia-Pacific region. Of the organizations surveyed, 67% had between 10 and 99 physical servers, and 22% had more than 200.

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