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What the Salesman Did Not Tell You: The Murky Side of Virtualisation

Pressure from the top boss to increase Return on Investment (ROI) and decrease Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can lead to you take hasty decisions resulting in diametrically opposite consequences. While your understand the immense possibilities and savings in terms of hardware and power that virtualisation has to offer, it is important to be realistic and understand the drawbacks in order to make a fair judgment before you invest in it.

Following are some of the most notable drawbacks of virtualisation. Read on know what a muddle slapdash virtualisation execution can put you in.

Additional Hardware Costs: minimal disaster recovery time is one of the alleged advantages of server virtualisation. If you explore deeper this actually involves investing in redundant hardware to ensure that the failure of one physical server allows you to restart your virtual machines on a backup server, which probably shares storage space with the failed server on a SAN or an NAS. And use of archaic computers as the backup server is not an option as virtualisation is a hardware monster and requires high-end machines. The costs can be reduced by assigning priorities to the applications running on the Virtual Machines. Second, carefully consider the criticality of the applications before employing an al round 1+1 backup scheme.

Staff Training Requisites: virtualisation alone cannot be the answer to all your IT problems. Ensuring the staff assigned to maintain and monitor the virtual machines gets significant training before the technology is officially deployed is of high importance as well. Maintaining virtual machines will involve dynamic and sometimes manual resource allocation since the responsiveness of critical applications can go down if they do not have access to the amount of resources they require. Training ensures smoother transition between legacy systems and newer virtualised systems.

Readiness Tests: an adventurous company ,after reaping the benefits of infrastructure virtualisation, may rush into server virtualisation without conducting operational readiness tests (selectively neglected for no known reason). The importance of conducting these tests can later on come as a rude awakening when the ROI numbers do not look as good as they did on paper.

Application Incompatibility: it has been seen that applications that work perfectly fine on standalone physical servers lose certain functionality and cause problems when they are deployed on to virtual machines. This is usually because of middleware dependencies and configuration issues and can be rectified easily.

Virtual Machine Sprawl: because creating new virtualised servers is so quick and easy, many organizations have a problem with “VM Sprawl”. With VM Sprawl, the number of virtual machines (VM) running in a virtualized infrastructure increases over time, any they may not be absolutely necessary for the business. To prevent virtualisation sprawl, the administrator should define and enforce a process for the deployment of VMs and create a library of standardized VM image files. VMs that are being under-utilised should be archived.

Results of a survey conducted recently show that 80 percent of all large corporations have implemented virtualisation in one of its many forms but only 10 percent have delved into virtualising their servers. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages by far, and it pays to venture in to implementing virtualisation with a thorough understanding of the pros and cons.

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What the Salesman Did Not Tell You: The Murky Side of Virtualisation

Pundits are saying 2010 will be the year of virtualisation. It takes an unbiased opinion to make a wise decision about something of as high importance for an organisation as this. Read on to find out what you probably did not know about virtualisation.

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