Optimizing Virtualization ROI

Adopt IT best practices to improve your bottom-line business performance, deliver sustainable competitive advantage and gain greater total value from virtualization. These best practices help you overcome obstacles that limit the full potential of economic and functional benefits of virtualization, such as:

• Cost of virtual infrastructure ― Many organizations target their first virtualization rollouts at low-hanging fruit, where the return on investment (ROI) is so high that savings substantially exceed the costs of implementing virtualization. These savings may not be as dramatic in the next round of virtualization.
• Limitations in effectively allocating virtual resources to application workloads ― Without real visibility into how application workloads are running, and without a simple and effective way to reassign virtual resources to those workloads based on fluctuating demand, virtualized environments can wind up as static and as poorly aligned with the business as conventional environments.
• Complexity of managing virtualized environments ― Many IT decision makers have become somewhat inhibited about broadening their rollouts of virtualization because of the management issues they have encountered in virtualized environments.
• Resistance by application owners ― Not all application owners are willing to give up the sense of security they get from having exclusive rights to known physical resources.
• Lack of in-house experience and expertise ― An undersupply of in-house experience and expertise is a major potential bottleneck for broader and more effective use of virtualization in the production environment.

To address these challenges, IT organizations can adopt five best practices that maximize the benefits of virtualization:

• Optimally allocating virtual resources to specific application workloads ― Get granular, drill-down visibility into how specific application processes utilize specific resources, namely processor time and machine input/output (I/O), to accurately and continually align the allocation of infrastructure capacity with business need.
• Unifying management from physical machine to application workload ― Create a common view into the entire infrastructure stack that directly maps physical resources, virtual resources, OS processes and application processes to each other to see how one correlates to every other layer in the stack.
• Choosing the right virtualization platform based on price, performance and manageability ― Be careful when choosing from several different hypervisor platforms to ensure that the choice does not inhibit your ability to make the broadest and best possible use of virtualization.
• Documenting virtualization benefits for application owners ― Deliver and document the benefits of virtualization to applications owners and give them real-time visibility into the virtual resources allocated to their critical application processes.
• Accessing ready guidance for workload virtualization ― Tap external knowledge resources to get necessary guidance in the provisioning and allocation of virtual machines (VMs) to application workloads, making these processes more predictable and less time-consuming.