Thanks to the overwhelming benefits most IT departments have already deployed virtualization across some of their infrastructure with plans to increase the level of virtualization in the near future. According to the EMA study cited below the adoption of virtualization is growing at about 25% per year with over 95% of all enterprises using some form of virtualization already.

The cost benefits of virtualization can be exceptional but the process also provides for superior availability, disaster recovery, and load balancing.  It also facilitates faster software deployment and development as those processes are disconnected from physical hardware limitations.   Virtualization also reduces downtime and the complications associated with hardware failure.

In a paper for BMC software, IT consultancy Enterprise Management Associates took a look at best practices in the virtualization space and identified areas where virtualization brings unique challenges to the enterprise infrastructure.

EMA recommend adoption of the best practices as defined in the IT Infrastructure Library “ITIL“, an IT community approach to bringing workable, quality standards to IT practices.

The study suggested that despite its many advantages, virtualization does bring a host of complications to the table relating to the need to manage, allocated, and scale the virtual server environment effectively.

EMA:

Application performance monitoring and availability management become much more complex, as virtualization makes it harder to map virtual resources to physical systems…

It is harder to accurately detect, measure, and plan capacity, because virtual services are so rapidly deployed, consumed, and destroyed….

Cost accounting and financial management becomes much more intricate and time-consuming, as tools must measure rapidly changing virtual environments, and license management and compliance are much harder to measure and enforce …

Ensuring service levels becomes harder, because the new virtualization layer increases the potential for errors and chokepointd…

The solution, says EMA, is to implement a quality virtualization management software system, consistent with the IT Infrastructure Library Guidelines, such as the solutions provided by BMC.  EMA suggests BMC is a superior environment and more consistent with best practices and the Infrastructure Library than much of the competition, though we should note that this white paper was written for BMC and thus is probably not to be taken as an unbiased evaluation of all the options - rather just good basic insight into the issue of best practices with respect to virtualization of the enterprise.