CA and VMware Reveal Results of Server Virtualization Maturity Study

CA and VMware have reportedly announced the results of a study investigating the impact of virtualization on data center operations.

According to the findings, when the use of recommended practices with actual outcomes was compared, all groups scored high on the soft outcome measures. This indicates that virtualization makes production quality and service management efforts easier, to Kurt Milne, managing director, IT Process Institute, said.
 

The study identifies specific procedures and controls that have to 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.

 

The report also found that higher levels of virtualization maturity predict higher levels of performance in areas of reduced sprawl and configuration variance, increased use of automation and reduced operational risk. In addition, organizations that pursued dynamic resource objectives had higher performance in the areas of increased speed and agility, fewer 'war room' responses to service outages, as well as reduced audit effort.

 

ITPI collected data from 323 North American IT organizations about their server virtualization practices. The IT Process Institute developed a set of recommendations for each level of maturity 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.

 

ITPI identified 11 practices for those organizations consolidating servers and virtualizing business-critical systems in production environments. These include host access, configuration and provisioning controls, virtual machine provisioning and capacity and performance management.

 

For those organizations expanding beyond server consolidation to high availability and disaster recovery objectives in an otherwise static environment, ITPI recommended 25 practices in all. The practices will help IT organizations to quickly respond to performance-impacting conditions.

 

ITPI recommended 12 practices for the organizations pursuing dynamic resource management objectives. These include controls primarily in the area of configuration discovery, change approval and tracking; capacity and performance management and overall process maturity needed to support automation.

 

The analysis of hard performance measures by ITPI found out that a statistically significant correlation exists between the use of recommended practices and various hard outcome measures.

 

According to Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA's (News - Alert) Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit, the ITPI study confirms that those who develop a virtualization management plan, with formalized procedures and controls, are most successful in achieving Lean IT in enterprise and cloud environments.

 

The study was conducted by the IT Process Institute in December.