Virtual Machine Software - Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
As Alan Laken is supposed to have said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." While this statement seems true in most areas of life, it really has an impact in the deployment of virtual machine software on both client and server systems. This goes against the strongly held belief in some quarters that there is no need to plan virtual machine deployments.
Since it's fairly easy to create a virtual machine, provision it with software, deploy it and when there's no need for its further existence, destroy it, why would anyone take on the burden of a formal process?
Why, then, do we hear of the following issues?
- Virtual machine sprawl replacing physical machine sprawl.
- Organizations having difficulty managing hybrid (physical plus virtual) systems
- Software license management in a hybrid datacenter
- Network management in a hybrid datacenter
- Storage management in a hybrid datacenter
If an organization takes the time to plan, all of these issues can be addressed with technology that's available today. If an organization allows the relative ease of deployment of virtual resources to override common sense, they're likely to end up with a patchwork quilt of products, tools and virtual resources that's hard to administer or operate.
What's your experience in this area? Does your organization have a set of processes and procedures that encompass the use of virtual resources?