Managing Virtualized Servers

Use virtualization management tools.

One of the challenges in earlier implementations of virtualized environments was the task of workload balancing. As multiple virtual servers were deployed on a single physical machine, it was difficult to tell if the various servers were competing for resources. The question of which workloads were where and how many of them could comfortably co-exist was more a matter of intuition than information.

With increasing maturity in the technology and management tools, that reality has changed. Workload balancing is now able to keep up with shifting business requirements, and the intelligence incorporated into these consoles allows for memory management, automated resource optimization, and policy control to keep critical processes from resource deprivation. The value of being able to easily move a virtualized server from one physical machine to another, without losing track of the resources, is best realized by using automated virtualization management tools.

Be aware that server sprawl can exist in the virtual world.

Some of the features that make virtualized servers so attractive — especially space and power efficiency, and ease of deployment — can also lead to the logical counterpart to server sprawl. Since virtualized servers are not physically evident, it is not always an easy matter to keep track of and control their proliferation. Resources can become scattered, inactive virtual machines can be lost, and their resources essentially lost with them.

Management tools available today are the best answer to this problem. Consoles that allow discovery, mapping, and management of virtualized servers can equip IT professionals to stay on top of the numbers of physical and logical servers under management and the allocation of resources among those servers — and even offer a means of visualizing the entire environment.

The need to manage, track, reclaim, and redeploy resources can be a significant challenge in a non-physical setting. The business rationale that is mobilized to implement virtualization needs to extend to managing the commissioning and decommissioning of resources beyond the initial implementation.