You can tell when an industry is starting to move to a higher level of maturity. It happens just about the time its original value proposition starts to feel a bit stale. If you look at the virtualization industry, you no longer hear long speeches about server consolidation and increased utilization. The bedrock is in place. Most data centers are where they need to be. The question is, how do you do start spreading the positive benefits of all the flexibility you get from virtualization? Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti says that in 2013 virtualization must be used in advanced ways to pay off. Savings from server consolidation will no longer be the focus. Instead, virtualization management techniques must grow in sophistication to support dynamic movement of workloads, improved disaster recovery, and hybrid data centers.
The requirements of the application will dictate the virtualization platform, not the other way around. In addition, virtualization management tools will be freshly consolidated and offer loads of analytics. CFOs will expect that power to be put to good use to achieve cost transparency, not just brute-force savings.
So how do we get there? Bartoletti drives it home in a way I can't help but agree with. First, he says that if you want to get full value out of your VMs, you have to be able to move them where they are needed. And in order to that, you need to automate.
The story is similar when it comes to the rise of the software-defined data center (SDDC). This will also be a big venue for automation. As Bartoletti writes, "If you can provision a new VM in seconds but it takes days to allocate storage or network resources for it, you should be watching this space. We're just at the beginning."
Sometimes, there is too much of a focus on pipes and feeds, and not enough on the great things you can do when a shared virtualized environment can be extended to include the public cloud and applications. "Stop buying infrastructure management tools and start buying tools that let you easily provision and auto-configure complex services," Bartoletti exhorts.
If virtualization is to rise to the agile and dynamic heights predicted, automation is the way to get there.
Learn More
- Automate provisioning and configuration of VMware vSphere virtual machines
- Stand-up VMware private cloud apps with vFabric Application Director and Puppet Enterprise
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