Quoting the Hyperic Blog

Virtualization is one of the most disruptive trends in IT today, and it’s going through a major change.

EMA’s Andi Mann, recently told us that about a quarter of all implementations of virtualization are outside of test and development. And this number is growing quickly. This means that there are newfound pressures for production ready virtualization implementations to succeed - success factors that have typically been outside the realm of test and development environments. Two of the main drivers inadequately addressed by the market are security and systems management. Many people are picking up on the security - but what baffles me is people aren’t talking more about the systems management problem with this new architecture.

There exists a new “Virtual Divide” created by separating the applications inside the VM’s from the physical resources they consume. A new layer in the architecture leaves most systems management strategies ill-equipped to cross the divide. System Administrators are left with a forked, un-rationalized view of the performance and health of their systems, typically resorting to redeploying VM’s to larger partitions rather then really diagnosing or preventing problems before they occur. This becomes a giant game of “whack-a-mole”, and forces virtualization adoption to be slow and tempered in order to control the chaos. System Administrators generally have difficulty planning their adoption, and use caution to see if their applications are successful in the design that they laid out. What they need to be more confident and to achieve virtualization optimization is information and tools that are suited for this new architecture. In short, management of IT resources across this “virtual divide” requires a new type of systems management software.

Hyperic HQ fortunately has these capabilities, and we were able to adapt and extend our capabilities to close the virtual divide with our December release of Hyperic HQ for VMware. What is surprising though, is that we still have questions on this. I have regular conversations with customers who have a web infrastructure systems management problem and they are looking for Hyperic to help, only to find that they also have VMware installed and just think that they have to live with this disjointed virtual/physical world.

So, we wrote a whitepaper to explain it to everyone. If you are considering embarking on virtualization in a production, mission critical environment - whether you use Hyperic now or not - you will learn quite a bit about the challenges that lay ahead and the options to secure your success, and learn more about how to “Bridge the Virtual Divide” using a systems management strategy purpose-built for this new challenge. Download the whitepaper today.

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