Study Finds How to Avoid the Risks of a Virtualization

CA and VMware announced the results of a sponsored study investigating the impact of data centers virtualization. The study, conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI) in December 2008, identifies specific procedures and controls that should be considered to reduce risk as organizations virtualize business-critical systems and when production virtualization objectives beyond server consolidation evolve to high availability, disaster recovery, and dynamic resource management scenarios.

ITPI has collected data from 323 North American IT organizations about their server virtualization practices. The survey focused on the procedures and controls used most frequently to manage the technology. Based on an analysis of the procedural changes the IT organizations made to optimize the benefits and reduce the risks of virtualizing production data centers, the IT Process Institute developed the following for each level of maturity.

Key findings of the study:

• 72% of study participants are aggressively virtualizing production servers. Of those, 58% had at one point paused adoption to improve operating procedures, and 64% are now comfortable virtualizing business critical systems.
• Of the study population 19% are only pursuing server consolidation objectives, 22% are also pursuing high availability and disaster recovery objectives, and 31% are pursuing dynamic resource optimization objectives.
• The maturity of use of 51 related virtualization management procedures and controls correlates with objectives.
  • Organizations aggressively consolidating production servers, average 45% of tested practices in use.
  • Organizations with high availability, disaster recovery and dynamic resource objectives, average 69% of tested practices in use.
• Overall, the use of production virtualization does require changes to operating procedures and controls.
• Those organizations with a strong foundation of process controls and best practices procedures may only need to modify controls in a few areas to pursue consolidation objectives. However, those pursuing higher maturity objectives should consider additional procedures and controls.

Main conclusions of the study

The use of virtualization in production does change required operating procedures and controls in order to effectively manage operational risk. Those organizations with a strong foundation of process controls and best practices procedures such as ITIL, may only need to modify controls in a few areas to pursue consolidation objectives.
However, pursuing higher maturity objectives requires consideration and implementation of additional procedures and controls.

• Those pursuing higher maturity server virtualization objectives use more controls:
• Not yet in production – organizations not aggressively virtualizing production servers average 41% of the 51 tested practices in use.
• Baseline maturity – organizations aggressively consolidating production servers average 45% of tested practices in use.
• High maturity – organizations that have consolidated servers and are now pursuing high availability, disaster recovery, and dynamic resource objectives, average 69% of tested practices in use.

A free copy of the full report is available at http://ca.com/itpi/virtualization and http://www.vmware.com/partners/alliances/technology/ca.html.