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This Forrester research report to determine the top priorities and challenges of today’s virtualisation professionals, explores the current role of virtualisation in the overall environment and barriers to further deployment.
This report includes analysis of how performance is measured for both the environment and those managing virtualised servers.
December 23, 2008 Removing Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tripwire Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 2 - TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................... 3 Virtualization Experience Grows And So Does Criticality ................................................................ 4 Virtualization Presents New Challenges ................................................................................................ 6 Management Is The Key To Eliminating Barriers ................................................................................. 8 Time Spent Troubleshooting Virtual Servers Hasn t Risen Yet ................................................... 9 Increasing The Efficiency Of Your Virtual Environment ...................................................................... 11 Build A Virtualization-Aware Management Infrastructure ............................................................... 12 Optimize Your Organization And Process ...................................................................................... 13 Appendix A: Methodology .................................................................................................................... 16 Appendix B: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................... 17 2008, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Forrester clients may make one attributed copy or slide of each figure contained herein. Additional reproduction is strictly prohibited. For additional reproduction rights and usage information, go to www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 3 - Executive Summary Server virtualization technology has drastically improved hardware utilization, disaster recovery capabilities, and time-to-market. As virtualization matured and IT organizations become more familiar with the technology, it has seen greater use for more mission-critical applications. But management challenges can ultimately limit the amount of cost you can drive out of your environment. Forrester believes that more virtualization-aware management tools and processes are necessary before we can fully virtualize our production servers and reach the lowest-possible cost per VM. You can overcome barriers to virtual server scalability and wider production deployment by adopting better tools and processes that aggregate information from virtual systems, provide real-time control, and reduce overhead by consolidating management tasks. In October 2008, Tripwire commissioned Forrester Consulting to research these challenges to the further deployment of server virtualization. Forrester endeavored to determine the top priorities and challenges of today s virtualization professionals through fielding and analysis of a survey of 164 virtualization professionals. This study included inquiry into the current role of virtualization in the overall environment and barriers to further deployment, as well as how performance is measured for both the environment and those managing virtualized servers. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 4 - Virtualization Experience Grows And So Does Criticality Server virtualization technology has been rapidly adopted over the past 10 years. As the technology has matured, so has enterprise experience but not every company uses virtualization to the same degree, with many firms experimenting on a small scale. To better understand the issue associated with running significant virtualized environments, Forrester surveyed large companies that are running virtualization on at least 10 physical hosts. According to the survey, more than half of the respondents had greater than five years of experience, running about 21 to 30 physical hosts (see Figure 1). And as experience with virtualization grows, firms tend to trust it with more complex or critical applications. In fact, server virtualization is used for most new production servers at 45% of the organizations we surveyed, plus an additional 15% have made virtual servers their default server policy (see Figure 2). According to Forrester s research, respondents expect to virtualize nearly every kind of application even smaller databases or email systems, although there is a slight preference for Web or application server workloads.1 Figure 1: All Survey Respondents Have More Than Two Years Experience With Server Virtualization Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 5 - Figure 2: Virtualization Is Being Used Extensively In Production Environments Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 6 - Virtualization Presents New Challenges Server virtualization is popular because it lowers the cost of IT particularly the amount of hardware required. Plus, it allows organizations to provide new capabilities at low cost, such as disaster recovery, fault-tolerance, and workload management. But these new capabilities come with some strings attached. Although firms may virtualize apps of every type, we believe that certain management-related challenges must be overcome to reach massive scale, as well as to ensure availability and performance for your most critical or high-performance applications: " Virtual servers have different management needs than physical machines. For example, VMs (VMs) may be offline for periods of time, which prevents agent-based system management tools from communicating with them. In addition, the ability of VMs to move between physical machines can confuse performance management tools or trigger erroneous warnings. As a result, you need updated management tools to gain insight into your virtual environment. Without better management, it will be difficult to scale up the number of VMs while simultaneously running at high levels of system utilization. We believe that management tools must mature to provide the same level of insight into performance and availability as they do for dedicated servers. " Forrester expects the number of virtualization platforms to keep growing. Today, there are just a few strong leading platforms, but there are many viable alternatives on the horizon. There will not be one winner we expect firms to run two or three different virtualization platforms, just as they do with server operating systems. Ultimately, this means more complicated management for virtual infrastructure administrators who must cope with multiple proprietary tools. " Many firms are concerned about multiple VM failures. Although virtualization products are designed to partition system resources, misconfigurations can affect multiple VMs on the same physical server. Of the firms we surveyed, 57% expressed significant concern that application failures in one VM could affect other VMs in the future (see Figure 3). Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 7 - Figure 3: Firms Worry That A VM Failure Could Spread To Other VMs On The Same Server Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 8 - Management Is The Key To Eliminating Barriers When we asked survey respondents to rank the barriers to wider deployment, we found several key issues that are directly or indirectly related to management of virtual systems (see Figure 4). Overall, we believe that if you can improve system management, you can avoid the barriers that have prevented other firms from reaching wider deployment of server virtualization: " Guaranteeing performance and availability. It is well known that virtual servers don t always provide 100% of the performance of a dedicated physical server, and we believe that virtual server availability is better than what could be achieved on bare metal. However, a key problem that administrators face is how to guarantee a certain level of performance and availability. " Immature management tools for virtualized systems. Management has not been an issue for IT shops that are early in their rollout of server virtualization many are satisfied with just basic provisioning tools for VMs. Plus, firms with little automation found that provisioning VMs was much easier than their existing procedure. But the immaturity of management tools really starts to matter as the size and criticality of the virtual environment grows. The lack of configuration management, security, and other more advanced capabilities then begins to limit your ability to virtualize your most sensitive apps. Figure 4: Guaranteeing Performance And Availability Is The Top Barrier To Wider VM Use The widespread use of server virtualization in production environments means that the performance and reliability of these systems must match that of other production platforms. When we asked survey respondents to rank their top issues with managing virtual environments, a majority chose preventing critical events from affecting performance or availability (see Figure 5). Despite IT s efforts, problems inevitably occur which is why respondents also told us that diagnosing problems ranked close in importance to preventing them in the first place. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 9 - Figure 5: Preventing And Diagnosing Problems Are The Top VM Administrator Concerns Time Spent Troubleshooting Virtual Servers Hasn t Risen Yet Our survey respondents are concerned about the maturity of management tools for virtualized systems as well as their ability to guarantee performance and availability. In addition, many firms believe that they have experienced multiple related VM failures, and worry about it occurring in the future. Why do most administrators spend the same or less time troubleshooting virtual servers (see Figure 6)? It is because our respondents are indeed being held back from more extensive deployments. If they were forced to virtualize more systems without better tools or processes, then their time spent managing them would have to increase as well. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 10 - Figure 6: Firms Have Been Able To Avoid Spending More Time On VM Troubleshooting Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 11 - Increasing The Efficiency Of Your Virtual Environment Many IT shops settle for just a few VMs per physical server but they re leaving money on the table. If you re purchasing larger physical servers, and paying for upgraded management capabilities, the cost savings from the first few VMs are a wash after you pay all the bills. In order to really reduce costs, you must increase the efficiency of your virtual environment by running many more VMs per host. In addition, virtualization must be extended to the majority of your application workloads not just to the low-hanging fruit. How are other firms working toward higher levels of efficiency? Almost all of our survey respondents measure the financial performance of their virtual environment. Only 4% said they didn t track financials at all, while a 74% majority calculated an average cost per VM across the environment (see Figure 7). Figure 7: Almost All Respondents Track The Financial Performance Of Their Virtual Servers In addition, infrastructure and operations managers personal goals now make them accountable for the performance of their virtualized systems. Only 4% of our respondents have no specific performance goals concerning server virtualization (see Figure 8). For the majority of managers who are accountable, virtual server availability, ROI, and cost reduction top the list with ROI being the most frequently chosen performance metric. Not surprisingly, 64% of our respondents agreed that they would like to run more VMs per physical server. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 12 - Figure 8: Server Virtualization Success Affects Most Respondents Performance Reviews Build A Virtualization-Aware Management Infrastructure Your management infrastructure needs to help drive down the cost per VM. To do that, you must run more VMs per physical server and do so without sacrificing availability or performance, while keeping administrative costs low. Interest in management tools that assist with these needs was apparent in the survey results (see Figure 9). To achieve both cost and performance goals as you build your virtual infrastructure, you should select management tools that can: " Aggregate information. Your management tools must pull together information from multiple virtual and physical machines to present a complete picture of issues that could affect performance or availability. Many legacy tools can run their agents on individual VMs but cannot understand the whole picture, as events affecting a VM may exist outside its field of view. Virtual infrastructure management tools need to pull data from the physical infrastructure and well as VMs. Administrators get a holistic view of infrastructure health, without having to visit multiple point products to collect all the information they need. " Consolidate management tasks. As noted earlier, we believe that the number of hypervisors in typical data centers will increase as vendors offer increasingly interesting alternatives. Over the next year or two, virtual infrastructure management tools will need to integrate with the top virtualization platforms " Make automated and intelligent decisions. In order to manage large numbers of VMs, you will clearly need basic automation for frequent tasks like patching or provisioning. However, in order to run at maximum utilization, you need management tools that can quickly detect problems and correct them. Virtualization vendors build some tools like automated workload management and high availability into their platforms, but these Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 13 - features are blind to underlying problems they move VMs away from troubled servers, but they don t correct the root cause. Figure 9: Firms Need Consolidated Virtual And Physical Server Management Optimize Your Organization And Process As you upgrade your virtualization management capabilities, don t neglect organizational and IT process issues. Just like bad tools, outdated management practices can wreck the efficiency and ROI from your state-of-the-art technology. For example, many firms have discovered that their IT outsourcers charge the same for managing virtual and physical servers. While they spend less on hardware now, their operational costs are unchanged. How can that be? It simply means that the managed service provider uses the exact same tools and procedures to run both virtual and physical servers. Because they have not revamped their processes, there can be no management savings. If you intend to reduce your cost of operations, then you must not only virtualize servers, but also change the way you manage them. Because server virtualization consolidates server, storage, and network resources into a single box, firms are discovering that some slight changes are necessary. For example, it can be impractical to train all administrators on server virtualization in larger IT shops, there are simply too many people. Even so, large numbers of administrators are being trained on virtualization management (see Figure 10). Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 14 - Figure 10: Firms Are Training An Unnecessary Number Staff On VM Management Tools We believe that larger firms will create specialized virtual infrastructure administrators that are responsible for running the virtual environment itself. In fact, almost 58% of our survey respondents already have virtual infrastructure administrators that are responsible for the hypervisor itself (see Figure 11). In addition, some of those specialized administrators have also taken over responsibility for the physical servers, virtual networks, and virtual storage as well. This is an important trend because: " It s more efficient. Having a dedicated group of virtual infrastructure administrators will allow other server administrators to focus on running the operating systems and applications inside the VMs with no need for cross-training. " Virtual infrastructure should be managed across application teams. Your virtual infrastructure provides a pool of resources that can be shared across many applications for load balancing or disaster recovery purposes. But if we put that infrastructure in the hands of multiple administrators or teams, we risk forming islands of resources just like we already have today. By centrally managing the virtual infrastructure, you can ensure that uniform policies and configuration standards are used and that resources can be shared across a large number of systems. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 15 - Figure 11: Many Firms Have Created Specialized Virtual Infrastructure Administrators Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 16 - Appendix A: Methodology In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 164 organizations in the US and Europe to evaluate the role and management of server virtualization within IT environments. Survey participants were specifically responsible for management or administration of their organization s virtualized servers, and were employed by organizations with more than 10 physical servers running a hypervisor in production. The survey also focused on respondents whose organizations had more than two years of experience using server virtualization. Questions provided to the participants asked about key management concerns, barriers to further virtualization, and virtualization performance metrics. The study was fielded in November 2008. Untitled DocumentRemoving Barriers To Better Server Virtualization Efficiency - 17 - Appendix B: Endnotes 1 Forrester Research, Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2008
