Unlocking Virtualization: Facing IT, Business Realities

With its promise of radically reduced costs, space savings, increased provisioning speeds, and environmental benefits, virtualization on a large scale is a game-changing technology. Unfortunately, too many organizations will find these benefits out of reach unless they discover how to reconcile a virtual infrastructure with the realities of their operational environments. Otherwise, what guarantee is there that businesses can meet competitive objectives?
That's not a rhetorical question—if business technology professionals hope to extend use of virtual machines beyond labs and testing environments to reliably host critical production applications and perform large-scale server consolidation, we must come to grips with functions such as configuration management, performance monitoring, and capacity planning. Governance and systems management were required in traditional environments, and the rules have not suddenly changed just because our servers are now virtual.
To really transform an organization and take advantage of all the potential that virtualization has to offer, IT and business leaders must partner to tackle thorny management problems that have plagued us all—in some cases, for decades. Our poll of 348 business technology professionals touches on such areas as security and privacy, and in this report, we'll explore IT's ability to assure performance, stability, and availability of virtualized servers, and to provide SLA metrics back to business. We'll also examine the perceptions of IT decision makers running virtualized environments and see how well their objectives map to business drivers. A reality check on some of the expectations that are fueling the mad rush to virtualization reveals lingering concerns surrounding the technology, and we'll present best practices gleaned from our experience.
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