Investing in Virtualization With an Economic Headwind

Virtualization--and specifically server virtualization--provides tremendous benefits, but in order to achieve these benefits, it's necessary to make an initial investment in the virtualization platform as well as the infrastructure to support it. In actuality, the investment in the supporting infrastructure far and away outweighs the cost of the virtualization platform, especially since you can now get the hypervisor for free. I know, the free versions don't have all the bells and whistles, but let's face it--it's a good start in the right direction.

In times of economic uncertainty, it becomes even more important to leverage existing investments, further increase efficiency and monitor every dollar spent. The virtualization environments I see being deployed still have significant overhead built into them. There is no question that they have indeed consolidated and improved resource utilization, but there is more that can be done to further drive up consolidation and utilization. I see IT administrators left scratching their heads as they get pressured from an executive level to continue virtualizing without making further investments. This is causing a plateau in adoption and frankly slowing adoption.

We recently spent some time with the folks at VKernel and saw a company that has the opportunity to thrive in an unstable economy where IT budgets are constantly being squeezed. The meeting triggered me to think about the importance of making intelligent decisions in regards to:

• Achieving higher consolidation ratios, peak utilization and the optimum placement of virtual machines across the entire resource pool.
• Acquiring or more importantly NOT acquiring additional infrastructure to support the next wave of virtualization adoption.
• Predicting future bottlenecks and proactively taking action before response time is compromised. 
• Gaining cost visibility into the infrastructure and meter resource consumption through chargeback to show who is consuming what and how much it is costing. 

A small investment in solutions like the ones from VKernel have the ability to save or delay spending of  hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional infrastructure, further drive up efficiency, increase consolidation and ultimately lower the cost of virtualization.

Companies are quickly adopting virtualization and its many benefits and are now looking at the many ways they can optimize the infrastructure. In a recent ESG survey of VMware users, only 24% felt very confident that the current tools for managing their VMware environment were sufficient to maintain existing IT service levels. This opens the door for companies like VKernel to jump in and fill in the gaps with intelligence that can be used to make critical decisions with a high degree of confidence.

Comments

[John Gannon]

It will be interesting to see if capacity planning or chargeback (or some hybrid) will be the dominant model for quantification of cost savings. The former is certainly more technically focused while the latter is more business focused, although certainly they are closely related. Maybe the capacity planning guys will bolt on chargeback functionality and vice versa. We'll see...

[Christian Simko]

I'm one of the VKernel people Mark recently met with and he really nailed our messaging. From talking to our customer and learning how they are using our products, I continue to hear how most of them have over-provisioned their VMware infrastructures to ensure performance issues are limited. When economic times were good, it's easier to justify such expenditures. However, budgets are shrinking and organizations are going to need to figure out what they can do more with their existing infrastructure investments. There is a lot of resource capacity being wasted right now and many organizations need solutions like those from VKernel to help maximize their utilization but still make sure performance remains optimal. We welcome people to try our software and see the benefits for themselves.

[Mike DiPetrillo]

Mark hits this one on the head. I too see a lot of VMware customers over provisioning their environment. Of course I also see the vast majority of customers doing that with existing resources by redeploying old servers that got freed up through consolidation. This doesn't negate the fact that you either need to really understand your environment well in order to squeeze out the optimum configuration or you need to use some of the excellent 3rd party tools like VKernel to really hone in on the perfect deployment.