This week Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT management research and consulting firm released a research report which provides data and advice on managing virtualization deployments more effectively. The report is called: “Best Practices in Virtual Systems Management (VSM): Virtualization Metrics and Recommendations for Enterprises”
As with all major IT revolutions before it, virtualization has introduced new and difficult management challenges. Traditional management tools and processes are less useful for virtualization deployments, and without new approaches to Virtual Systems Management (VSM), enterprises will suffer from increased downtime, higher costs, staff shortages, lack of flexibility, competitive disadvantage, and many other problems.
Enterprise Management Associates’ research indicates that better response times, faster provisioning and improved efficiency are just of the few improvements seen with the use of specific VSM toolsets and best practices. Here are few other results a company might expect from following VSM best practices:
- Much lower administration costs, with the best performers saving over $3,300 per additional virtual machine (VM) on staff costs alone.
- Faster problem resolution and better uptime, with the best performers able to achieve an average of ‘five nines’ (99.999 percent) availability — less than one second of downtime per day.
- Extraordinary advantages for system deployment, with the best performers able to deploy a new system more than 240 times faster.
- Greatly improved server consolidation ratios, with the best performers able to reduce the actual number of physical servers in use by 35 percent or more.
- Greatly improve resource utilization, with the best performers able to run their virtualization deployment on about half as many physical servers.
- Significant results for Green IT initiatives, with the majority of enterprises able to prove a measurable reduction in power consumption since deploying virtualization.
The most successful VSM users have seen solid, measurable results. EMA suggests that enterprises use the advice and findings in this report to measure themselves against their peers, pinpoint their weak spots and start to correct them by deploying better processes. The full report is 71 pages and can be attained from EMA for $795.00 which seem reasonable considering the saving a business can achieve from good virtualization best practices and benchmarks. To get a copy of the report go to: http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/research/asset.php?id=1104
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Hardware Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on January 23, 2009
