CIO.com

Policies, tools and best practices guide for virtualization management

By SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

A virtualization management strategy should coincide with your deployment of virtual machines (VMs), otherwise you may end up with a Wild West scenario -- missing VMs, insufficient resources and ad hoc provisioning -- that's difficult to rein in once the virtual environment is in place.

Worst-case scenario, you find yourself asking the C-level suite for more money to buy virtualization management tools. "If you go to the CFO six months after requesting capital for a multimillion-dollar virtualization project and say, 'I don't know what capacity I have, we're running out of space on clusters and I don't know how to handle it. I need more capital to purchase these tools,' that puts you in a precarious position," said Chris Wolf, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Even if you're just starting off with a few virtual machines, key policies are a must-have, including naming conventions for associated resources such as storage, explained Chris Pray, senior engineer of global information systems at Vertex Pharmaceutical Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

In this guide, learn how to start developing a virtualization management strategy, including necessary policies and procedures, tools that cover capacity planning and right-sizing resources, and best practices for managing VM updates, patches and licensing.

Table of contents

  Developing a virtualization management strategy
  Table of Contents

The benefits gained through virtualization can be lost without an effective virtualization management strategy.

Enterprises gain agility, lean operations, disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as a virtualization management quagmire of policies, best practices documentation and tool sets that are a cycle behind the speed at which virtual environments are created.

Learn more about how two IT executives began building a management strategy for their fast-growing virtual environments in"Virtualization without virtualization management cancels out benefits." Also:

  Virtualization management tools
  Table of Contents

Tool selection is an important piece to developing a successful virtualization management strategy. While many server and desktop virtualization technologies come with their own sets of management capabilities, third-party tools, including free ones, are readily available.

Learn more about midmarket IT shops' choice of management tools, from virtualization software vendors like VMware Inc. and Microsoft, to third-party tool vendors, in "Virtual machine performance tools equal better ROI." Also:

  Optimizing the virtual environment
  Table of Contents

This virtualization optimization and implementation guide covers important topics for IT professionals and virtualization administrators, such as virtualization hypervisors, security strategies, storage infrastructures and more. These tips and strategies from the e-book Introduction to Virtualization can be applied to any data center, no matter the size, virtualization deployment stage or level of IT staff expertise.

Learn more in "Virtualization implementation and optimization guide." Also:

  Virtualization management best practices
  Table of Contents

When I ask my fellow CIOs to describe their most interesting and important initiatives, one topic consistently heads the list: Virtualization. It seems nearly all of us have implemented, are implementing, or are exploring virtualization. Our company is about 18 months into our virtualization project. We have virtualized servers and storage, and we're now toying with desktops. In the interest of finding out what others have learned from their virtualization projects and research, I sent a virtualization poll out to my "network of nerds." Based on their responses, I have learned the following:

What to virtualize. There seems to be a general sense that we should start by virtualizing our older, less transaction-intensive applications and associated servers. Some of us have reduced our physical server counts by 50% to 60%. But many of us have not yet taken the plunge of virtualizing our heavy-duty applications like enterprise resource planning and Microsoft Exchange. Nor have we felt comfortable virtualizing our production database servers. This reluctance to put our IT bread and butter in a virtual environment is not just our being gutless. Rather, we are concerned about creating the potential for a single point of failure for our most critical applications.

Learn more in "Virtualization: A guide to success for CIOs." Also:

  More resources
  Table of Contents

12 Jan 2011

All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2007 - 2024, TechTarget | Read our Privacy Statement