Differences

Virtualization is Transforming IT

IT environments are being dramatically transformed by virtualization. The advent of low cost hosts, combined with the myriad ways virtual systems can be built, bought and derived is resulting in increased flexibility for IT, and rapid growth within virtual environments. New systems can be converted from physical to virtual (P2V), quickly provisioned from templates or cloned from other systems. New products and technologies package applications directly into VMs, while others optimize existing VMs by removing unnecessary components. Virtual machines, packaged as virtual appliances, provide new delivery modes increasingly leveraged by both ISVs and IHVs. VMs are also emerging as a uniform, common container format to pass between Development, Test and Production functions within an organization. It’s no wonder that virtualization is viewed as the “most impactful” technology effecting IT over the next five years.

Creating a New Virtual Management Landscape

However, in addition to improving IT responsiveness and agility, these emerging virtual environments present many new management scenarios. They introduce new configuration dynamics, including new virtual asset types, relationships and dependencies. The introduction of snapshots make it easy for configuration tasks, like patching and updating systems, to be inadvertently undone. And many of these dynamics are invisible to virtual machines and guest operating systems themselves, and are only clearly visible outside of the VM, at the virtualization layer. Inaccurate and incomplete configuration management information already leads to over 60% of operations and management problems - these new dynamics can only cause that failure rate to rise. As a result, additional management and control points, along with the new system states and formats introduced by virtualization, must be considered when attempting to manage these dynamic new environments.