The V-word is in the jargon lexicon to stay. Virtualisation is now in the mainstream, it is the received orthodoxy in enterprise computing and every single organisation now has to learn how to manage it.
It may be coming the day after tomorrow for SMEs, although many of them have already dipped their toes, but for larger organisations there is already a virtualised environment that has to be managed. Since one of the major claims for virtualisation has always been its ease of management, the naive and less experienced might be led to ask ‘why then should management be an issue now that we have embraced virtualisation?’ Alas, in IT nothing is ever that simple, nothing ever matches the hype and doing what it says on the tin is usually a broad strategic objective rather than a detailed guarantee.
But in truth, virtualisation does actually work, perform very well and very largely deliver on its promise. With the usual caveats, we can hardly quarrel: when chosen well, designed and properly set up, maintained and managed well and in the light of the specific objectives at which the project was originally aimed – so, no change there then.
Near complete success
Actually, yes there is. Server consolidation by moving to a virtualised infrastructure has been as near universally successful as makes no difference. Organisations which have implemented it report reductions in physical boxes of the order of 6:1 with the obvious corresponding improvements in power consumption for running and cooling, lower technical maintenance costs and so on. Server utilisation levels have risen as the corollary of the reduced number of processors and almost all users report measured or perceived improvement in overall performance. That particularly applies to availability, since virtualisation allows for fast and automated failover between the components in the IT infrastructure.
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