Xangati, the first management solution to provide virtual machine (VM)-to-Anything visibility, today shared additional results from its survey of more than 750 IT executives on server virtualization. The expanded survey findings show that the majority of respondents believe advanced visibility into how their virtual servers are performing and improved understanding of the behaviors of their virtualized applications are critical to gaining confidence and achieving success in deploying mission-critical business applications.

Key findings of the survey include:

• 88 percent of the virtualization experts surveyed highlight that server performance metrics (CPU, memory, disk statistics) are NOT sufficient to effectively manage the performance of business critical applications on a virtual infrastructure;
• 89 percent of respondents believe increased visibility into VM communications would be very useful or useful; and
• 73 percent think that understanding the behavior of the multi-tier applications they are virtualizing is very important or important.

“Administrators have identified what is needed for them to accelerate their virtualization initiatives – increased visibility into all of the VM devices and applications on the virtual infrastructure – all of the time,” said Alan Robin, CEO of Xangati. “Only with insight into what a VM is actually doing and what it is communicating with can a virtualization manager hope to address the performance concerns of application owners. That visibility is the key to capitalize on the promises of virtualization with its simplified application management, decrease IT burdens, and enhance operational efficiencies.”

The survey showed that respondents across the board – at a staggering 97 percent – want immediate access to data in order to facilitate rapid problem identification – reinforcing the findings that their current virtualization management systems simply do not provide this ability.

“Because virtualization management solutions are server metric-oriented by nature, they leave blind spots into application communication on the virtual infrastructure,” explained Robin. “The experience of those surveyed points out that these blind spots result in performance issues that are difficult to find. Only with live visibility into VM-to-anything communications can you fill the gaps in understanding how to effectively support business critical applications.”

In a further drill down, data showed users believe that a lack of knowledge about how application tiers interact with each other is the biggest challenge in virtualizing multi-tier applications. Also, respondents said that knowing the top communications pairs to put on the same ESX server was the most useful data point for creating an effective cluster design to support business critical applications.

To access the complete survey results, please go to http://xangati.com/june22_press_briefing.php.