There are many ways of approaching the issue of VM stall.  Various barriers, both technological and organizational, need to be dealt with to move a stalled virtualization deployment forward.  Without the confidence of key stakeholders throughout the organization, even the best deployment plans can grind to a halt.  For this reason, sometimes IT staff must take an alternative approach to tackling the issue of VM stall.  The latest whitepaper from the CA Virtualization Team challenges a key assumption of almost all virtualization rollouts: consolidation of virtual servers is the key benefit of virtualizing physical servers.

1:1 virtualization, in which servers are virtualized but left unconsolidated and thus maintaining the 1:1 ratio of applications to servers, is intended as a stepping stone towards a full-scale virtualization rollout.  It is not a goal itself, but it can provide business leaders, application specialists, and even IT departments themselves the confidence to move forward with a stalled virtualization rollout.  This paper lays out the various agility benefits that 1:1 virtualization provides, which are substantial in and of themselves.  Examples include:

• Virtual process automation - administrators and end-users can quickly and efficiently accomplish tasks that are labor-intensive with physical systems.
• Storage flexibility - dramatically reduces the need for live migration of VMs from server to server, allowing organizations to move forward without major investments in centralized storage.
• Disaster recovery and maintenance - improve uptime and end-user experience by migrating VMs in case of server failure or routine maintenance instead of taking them offline, with or without centralized storage.
• Organizational benefits - improve efficiency in the IT department by reducing silos and endless provisioning and deprovisioning by system admins, thereby increasing efficiency and agility.

1:1 virtualization can provide ROI today, as well as a stepping stone towards further virtualization.  Click here to download the whitepaper and let us know what you think.