Maximize Your Virtualization ROI | Virtualization | Virtual Machine

Maximize Your Virtualization ROI
reprinted with permission from HP

Virtualization technology is a great way to increase business agility while reducing infrastructure costs. But it can also add another layer of management complexity, resulting in higher management costs and lower ROI. You need the right software tools to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

Managing virtualization becomes even more critical as virtualization projects move out of the development/test environments and into production. That’s why it needs to be incorporated into your operation management framework. Rather than manage virtualization as its own silo, a better approach is to integrate virtual and physical management – based on proven best practices. Then you can administer resources uniformly to monitor, manage and automate key management functions seamlessly across physical and virtual environments.

The results: dramatically reduced IT costs, improved business agility and the ability to increase IT efficiency. Here are the five key areas to accelerate and simplify the adoption of virtualization in your data center.

Key One: Automate manual process
Virtualization adds complexity to existing processes such as configuration and change management. This complexity can make it more difficult and costly to manage. That’s why automation is fundamental to virtualized service management.

Indeed, virtualization will not be effective without the right automation tools. With a single, integrated management solution, you can easily automate tasks and processes associated with change detection, configuration updates, provisioning and patching. And you gain visibility to all activities and changes in the virtual/physical environment so that you can enforce policy compliance.

By automating daily tasks at the operations level, you can make sure that you are not trading capital expenditure savings for added operational expense. Through automated auditing and reporting for mission-critical compliance issues (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, etc.), you can improve IT governance and reduce business risk.

Key two: Monitor virtual and physical environments
Enterprise-level service monitoring is the second critical component for virtualized service management. Rather than managing virtualization through specialized point products, an enterprise-wide service monitoring approach allows you to visualize the entire technology stack. This means you can detect, isolate and prevent service problems across heterogeneous environments – for physical and virtual servers, networks, applications and storage devices.

Key three: Comply with software licensing contracts
One typical challenge with virtualization is managing virtual machine sprawl and the software licenses that reside on them. The ideal solution is one that automatically discovers, identifies and reports assets – both physical and virtual – throughout the usage lifecycle. Based on this, IT can monitor contracts, track usage and manage charge-backs to help with software license compliance.

In addition to daily monitoring, comprehensive asset management can also provide vital insight. For example, a comprehensive asset management approach can reveal the financial and compliance impacts of software upgrades. IT can also realize savings by identifying over-provisioning. In fact, one organization saved 10% of software license costs by reducing license over-provisioning.

Key four: Protect your virtualized application
When a new virtual machine is instantiated on a host server, it runs backup and recovery to guard against data losses. Conventionally, backup is accomplished by a script-running agent in the virtual machine – quickly expending shared resources and effecting performance.
A better method is to offload backup processing to the storage array. This process increases the number of virtual machines on a given host server without impacting performance. You get a consistent production replica of your virtualized application data that, in turn, allows point-in-time recovery. The result: error-free recoveries that are measured in seconds and minutes rather than hour and days.

Key five: Validate the performance of virtualized applications
Virtualization requires more robust risk assessment tools to proactively detect and correct security vulnerabilities and defects associated with virtual assets. You need end-to-end capabilities for load testing business services in hybrid physical/virtual environments. Plus, you want the ability to quickly pinpoint the root cause of business service performance problems. Finally, you need to test from the end-user perspective to allow you to understand how virtualized business services will perform in real-world environments under peak load conditions.

HP offers software solutions in these five key areas to help you manage virtualization and maximize your virtualization ROI. Through automation, you empower support staff to work more effectively and efficiently. End-to-end infrastructure monitoring supports faster problem detection and remediation.

With solutions that help improve compliance and protect data, you can simplify the complexities of deploying virtualization technology. Most importantly, an integrated approach to virtualized service management means you can lower operational expense (OPEX) and reap the rewards of business agility.