Check out this latest whitepaper from the folks over at VMTurbo titled, "Operations Management in the Age of Virtualization."  

This 15 page whitepaper goes into the challenges of virtualization management and goes into detail of how VMTurbo manages the virtualized stacks with what it calls "economic abstractions."  It describes how VMTurbo's supply‐chain economy uniquely addresses certain requirements by combining monitoring (Observe), analytics (Advise), and actions (Automate) to enable proactive, ROI‐centric virtualization management.

The whitepaper summary reads like so:

Traditional IT architectures have been typically based on silos, with computing resources dedicated to specific applications and over‐engineered to accommodate peak demands and growth. Emerging virtualization systems have been replacing these silos with a layer of shared resources, multiplexed among dynamic workload demands. This consolidation of resources and workloads can result in dramatic productivity gains, improving the efficiency of IT infrastructures, and applications performance, while reducing IT costs.

However, virtualization leads to novel operations management challenges, beyond the scope of traditional paradigms. In particular:

(a) Virtual machine (VMs) resource utilization and performance behaviors may be dramatically different from those of physical servers. In contrast with physical servers, VMs see their resources fluctuate dynamically and may experience interference from other VMs.

(b) Virtualization increases the utilization of physical resources, possibly driving applications beyond the boundaries of safe operations.

(c) Virtualization eliminates IT silo boundaries, making each layer of the IT stack more sensitive to interference by the others. These interferences can lead to reduced performance, availability, and efficiency and reduced ROI at every layer of the IT stack.

Virtualization thus requires new resource and performance management technologies to handle these factors of complexity. These technologies need to replace manual partitioned management with ROIcentric, proactive, scalable, automated, and unified resource and performance management.

You can download this VMTurbo whitepaper here.