Today’s post is from Kalyan Ramanathan, who manages virtualization initiatives for our data center automation group. This is the first in a series of posts on how organizations use automation to improve their IT infrastructure management.
- Peter

Even in this down economy, data center virtualization is all the rage and that is for a good reason - virtualization brings many benefits, including infrastructure consolidation, reduced power usage, data center footprint etc. Not everything is rosy in this picture, though. Virtualization also introduces several challenges and IT management is definitely a critical one.

The beauty of virtualization is that this dirty little “management” monster only rears its head once you are deep into the dungeon!

Let us explain what I mean in the context of a recent conversation that I had with the data center managers of a large financial enterprise. This enterprise started out with a consolidation project and instantly found value by virtualizing its servers. By consolidating its Windows and Linux servers, IT was able to see a 20-30% reduction in servers counts. Fewer servers meant lower power usage and freed up data center racks. Managing the initial virtualization candidates – print server, Web servers was not that bad either, and a basic set of scripts and tools sufficed. The CIO is thrilled with the instant CapEx saving and IT became a hero.

Fast forward a year.

With their initial success, data center managers pushed to virtualize a large portion of their data center. So now that same IT department has 3x the number of servers. IT has more vendor technologies to contend with – VMware, Microsoft HyperV, Xen, etc. and each of these servers – hypervisors and virtual machines - needs to be configured and patched in a economy that prevents any IT headcount increases. And what about the agility and flexibility benefits?

While managing the homogenous Web farm servers was simple, the same cannot be said of complex applications that depend on resources such as storage, network etc. The data center managers were facing a severe operational issue. Left unattended, this problem was only going to become worse. “We traded CapEx for OpEx”, noted the director of operations, as he articulated their management challenges.

Are you seeing similar problems in your datacenter? Post a comment about your key management challenges.

You might want to read a free e-book by Realtime Publishers on Virtualization and Service Automation for some shortcuts on how to start a virtualization initiative and several pitfalls to avoid.

For Business Service Automation, Kalyan Ramanathan