Published: January 06 2011, 07:38 AM | no comments
by Andi Mann

I recently noticed this article on SearchServerVirtualization.com: "Enterprises face integration hurdles to private clouds."  Beth Pariseau raises a number of important challenges faced by organizations pursuing the impressive array of benefits of full-scale virtualization.  This post provides a brief overview of how the integrated management portfolio from CA Technologies can help overcome these challenges.

The difficulty of the technological and cultural adoption of full-scale virtualization

This challenge, which is a key cause of what we call VM stall, is common throughout most organizations actively pursuing virtualization.  Application specialists are wary of pooled resources that might negatively impact performance, and line of business owners worry about the risk of physical to virtual migration.  IT is concerned that current management tools and practices are insufficient to successfully support tier 1 and 2 application in a virtual infrastructure. 

CA Technologies has both the experience and the management solutions to ensure that the benefits of virtualization can be successfully realized with mission-critical applications.  Our recent acquisition of 4Base, a virtualization and cloud infrastructure consulting firm, provides the experience of hundreds of large-scale virtualization rollouts across dozens of industries.  In addition, CA Technologies virtualization management solutions bring enterprise class virtualization solutions to the data center.  Whether you need a virtual-only management solution or an enterprise-class product, CA Technologies is well positioned to be a strategic partner in overcoming the cultural and technological barriers behind VM stall.

"The uncharted waters of infrastructure automation"

The impact of virtual stall can be larger than expected as Beth notes.  Mixed environments can make the creation of a single platform for automation extremely challenging.  As automation is the basis for much of the functionality of private clouds, it is critical for both reducing costs and increasing agility.

However, with a partnership with CA Technologies, full-scale virtualization isn't necessary to automate your data center.  While it remains an important goal, we offer both virtual-only and enterprise-wide virtual and physical automation solutions.  CA Virtual Automation can assist with self-service, on-demand provisioning, resource pooling, scale-out, and chargeback for VM lifecycle management, functionalities that define the foundation of private cloud.  The CA Automation Suite automates across virtual and physical environments to maximize the benefits of automation and the private cloud.  In addition, CA Technologies offers recently acquired Hyperformix's powerful capacity management capability to ensure the virtual environment takes full advantage of your IT infrastructure.

Though Beth writes "point tools from multiple vendors, which are often distinct for physical and virtual infrastructure as well as for different aspects of virtualization management, are the status quo," it doesn't have to be with CA Technologies. 

Next generation service catalogs

Beth recounts the story of a systems integrator who worries that self-service provisioning is just an open invitation to spin out VMs that IT can't track and support.  License costs and compliance become a major issue when IT doesn't have full control over the provisioning of VMs.  As I mentioned in a recent post, CA Service Catalog in combination with CA Virtual Automation can help standardize a catalog of IT services that can be deployed with best practices baked in.  IT can carefully monitor and track templates to ensure that configurations remain up-to-date and users can't provision templates without the latest patches and updates.  Managing security groups that restrict different types of users to specific VM templates is also made easy and efficient. 

Chargeback and compliance in a virtual world

Chargeback can be a complex issue to tackle for many IT departments.  Virtual environments eliminate the simple and transparent ‘box by box' calculation that has been common throughout IT departments in the past.  Dynamic virtual environments require chargeback that drills down to the level of individual types of hardware resources.  As Beth notes, charging by megahertz or megabyte can be a serious cultural change for IT specialists with a certain way of doing things. 

As a result, chargeback can be an important part of virtual stall with two distinct challenges.  For one, companies must implement a technological solution that will successfully execute chargeback in a virtual environment.  Second, both line of business managers as well as IT managers must adjust to delivering services on the basis of quantity of resources allocated, not just time and number of servers utilized.  CA Virtual Automation offers sophisticated chargeback capabilities built-in, giving IT departments the tools to demonstrate the value of a new system of chargeback to the business. 

Compliance is similarly an increased technological and cultural challenge in a virtual world.  We offer CA Virtual Configuration to adjust to how configuration management needs to function in a dynamic virtual environment.  Instead of a static configurations and planned changes, the virtual environment requires active tracking and remediation to keep up with the fast-paced and complex configuration requirements of virtualization.  With CA Technologies, chargeback and compliance don't have to hold back your strategic goals.

Although there is no silver bullet for solving the challenges of virtualization, CA Technologies offers a comprehensive set of management solutions to maximize the value of the technology.  Along with the power of heterogeneous platform support, this sets CA Technologies apart among virtualization management vendors.  Visit www.ca.com/virtual to find out more.