Virtualisation’s missed opportunities

Virtualisation is an easy sell, so it’s no wonder that it’s become a popular choice for midmarket companies over the past few years. Whilst VMware still dominates the server virtualisation market with over 50% market share, competitors such as Microsoft and Citrix are quickly catching up. As such, VMware has shifted its focus to other innovative technologies such as data centre automation, network virtualisation and software defined storage as it continues to drive the market towards a ‘software defined data centre’ (SDDC).

The general view within the industry is that software defined networking (SDN) and storage (SDS) are still too immature; they are too much in their infancy for companies to deploy them within their data centres. After all, some companies are only just embracing virtualisation, years after it became a mature technology!
And with automation, orchestration and cloud requiring a significant overhaul to IT services and day-to-day operations, these technologies are still seen as more of a “want” than a “need”. Companies who have recently transitioned onto a virtual platform have only just recovered from the change in culture that virtualisation has brought, and as such, many are not yet eager to make that transition to cloud.

However, this year will see those who have virtualised start to look at how to better manage and monitor their environment, how to better engage end-user mobility, and how to plan their journey to the cloud.

So with countless opportunities available to them where do companies begin?
Operations management is a good place to start. Virtualisation technology has introduced a number of improvements to data centres, but it has also brought on certain challenges, such as monitoring utilisation and performance, virtual machine sprawl, and the lack of a clear line between support ownership. The speed of adoption of virtualisation and the complexity of the technology has outpaced the capabilities within a company's IT department to manage these problems.

A good way for IT professionals to keep up is by adopting a monitoring tool. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. There is no shortage of monitoring tools available on the market; however, different monitoring tools have different capabilities and usages. Some tools are only intended for general performance monitoring and alerts, whilst others offer very specific capacity analysis or troubleshooting capabilities.

However, considering most companies use VMware vSphere as their hypervisor, an increasingly popular monitoring tool is VMware vCenter Operations Manager, as it is heavily integrated with vSphere and vCenter Server. Due to the integration that VMware can offer, vCenter Operations Manager understands how the data being collected at every layer of the virtual stack correlates with one another, and also provides an analytics engine that is clever enough to adapt and learn what is considered “normal” operating behaviour within the virtual environment. The tool is easy to use with a clean dashboard that provides all the information an IT administrator would need access to on a single screen.

Only by offering insight into workload capacity and health can IT admins achieve higher capacity utilisation, consolidation ratios, and hardware savings. Gaining visibility into performance bottlenecks and leveraging recommendations for problem resolution lets IT admins fully understand the impact and root cause of the issues before the entire business is affected. As a result, it ensures application performance and health, while significantly reducing the amount of time spent on troubleshooting problems, a key to reducing the operating costs of IT.

Desktop Virtualisation is also an important area where companies who have recently taken on virtualisation may be missing out. Companies are continually offering employees the option to work from home, on the road, or on a customer site, which completely changes the nature of IT in the workplace. Today, the workforce is increasingly mobile and dispersed, which of course introduces a new set of requirements for technology to support.

In many ways, employees have taken the matter of productivity aids into their own hands, bringing their own devices such as tablets and smart-phones with them to work. Work that was previously confined to a single desktop PC or laptop is now being extended to these devices and taken outside the secure confines of a company’s building.

The variety of devices now rife within a business increases support problems related to the numerous hardware vendors involved. Data breaches caused by lost or stolen devices result in significant risk and costs to correct, not to mention the implications to the business for the data residing on those lost devices. The result is that deployment, support, and security of these various desktop, laptop and mobile devices have resulted in inefficient IT processes, such as manual deployment of physical devices, multiple corporate images, extended testing cycles for patch deployments, and multiple layers of complex software to ensure proper levels of security.

The solution to many of these issues is to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Moving computing resources back into the data centre makes them significantly easier to manage and control, plus improving the efficiency of both technology and personnel resource utilisation. Companies can significantly benefit from simplified provisioning and pooling methods that come with leveraging virtual machine technology that will drive down the time it takes to deploy new systems. On top of that, a centralised deployment of virtual desktops brings data security back within the grasps of IT administrators.

As the workplace shifts to a media-rich consumer environment, VDI must evolve to deliver not just a virtual desktops, but also a virtual workspace, delivering a unified experience that combines virtual desktop applications, voice services and video capabilities. From an IT perspective, the virtual workspace means IT offers an exceptionally flexible, secure workspace with a consistent, high-quality user experience. For the end users, it provides greater flexibility to access applications and empowers employees to choose their own devices to improve productivity, collaboration and mobility which can lead to better responsiveness and ultimately, raise productivity.

Completely adopting virtualisation can look like a daunting task, with challenges and considerations that could discourage even the most seasoned of IT professionals. Nevertheless, considering the benefits available, it is crucial that companies look at all the aspects of virtualisation so not to miss out.
Once a company is able to efficiently manage their resources and end users are comfortable with their virtualised workspace, the adoption of cloud technology will become an easier sell to senior board members, as the majority of a company’s workload will already be virtualised.