What's next after server virtualization

Virtualization in the form of the use of virtual machine software isn’t the panacea that many seem to believe. While the use of this technology is very helpful if an organization’s goal is consolidation to achieve some level of cost reduction, cost avoidance or, on occasion a more agile environment, its indiscriminate use creates new data center issues. The issues these organizations soon face are how to manage a growing list of virtual servers and how to rapidly and automatically deal with the growing network and storage access and management issues a proliferation of virtual servers creates.

It’s always important for business and IT decision-makers to keep their real goal in mind. Their goal, contrary to public opinion, is increasing the efficiency, flexibility and effectiveness of the organization so as to increase both revenues and profitability, not to effectively deploy virtual machine software. Increasingly both time to market and time to profit are major drivers in technology adoption. With this in mind, the adoption of virtual machine software or, in fact, any other type of technology, is a means to an end not a goal in itself.

What is the real goal in this area? The end being sought is increased business flexibility and offering better service to the customer. Virtual machine software is being deployed because it can help the organization quickly set up and tear down the systems that can support the organization’s rapidly changing needs in the fastest and most efficient way. What is not at all clear to most organizations is what are each of their machines in the datacenter are being utilized, how optimal is that utilization and is there more that these resources can do to help the organization.

This approach could also allow an organization to selectively retire machines that are reaching the end of their productive life or are not really contributing to the organization's goals, reduce power consumption, reduce the number of costly maintenance contracts (both hardware and software) and to make better utilization of the staff resources that manage those retired systems.

It is clear that virtual machine software that supports server virtualization was a great start at achieving the goals of organizational flexibility, efficiency and agility. That being said, no one starts down the path toward a more virtualized environment by saying “I want virtualization.” They usually are looking for ways to rapidly deploy workloads, the storage needed for the applications and data making up those workloads and, of course, making sure that individuals can access those applications quickly and cleanly on whatever appropriate system hardware the organization owns.