Virtualization and cloud computing are the two dominant technology trends in enterprise computing today. Both offer significant savings and improved efficiency across IT networks and departments.
But as Datamation reports, before companies can realize the full benefits of virtualized datacenters they first must conquer some considerable IT management hurdles created when so many applications and data pools are stored and run from virtual machines.
A Forrester Research report notes that the advent of virtualization and other technologies make it possible to provide an IT service for any task at low enough costs to benefit business productivity. But these tasks and workloads are added to the data center at a cost of further complexity.
“The major challenge for an IT organization is to effectively manage this complexity,” the report stated. “As an immense amount of data is collected from monitoring infrastructures and applications, it has now reached a point where it is beyond the correlating capabilities of human beings.”
Virtualization can be a boon to enterprises looking to consolidate servers and lower costs but a study of IT decision makers by Forrester Research concludes that several persistent issues keep companies from realizing the technology’s full potential.
The “Strategies to Improve IT Efficiencies in 2010” study highlighted three main management challenges IT departments face when implanting virtualization.
For one, survey respondents noted difficulty in establishing how much server size is needed to support virtual containers. Second, the study said it can be difficult to assess the performance and workload of application candidates for virtualization.
Lastly, the study said companies can encounter major performance issues at peak times due to resource contention between the virtual containers.
