Haydn Pinnell, MD of Gallium (an EOH company), says the move to deploying, or planning to deploy, virtualised applications is gathering pace. Many organisations are viewing virtualisation as a viable option to lowering the cost of maintenance and minimising compatibility issues.
He adds that the views about how to employ virtualisation differ quite markedly between organisations, with some paying it little heed, others looking at using it to manage their difficult applications, and still others looking to virtualise their whole application portfolios.
ChangeBASE AOK, a world leader in compatibility testing and automatic remediation software, with which Gallium recently announced a strategic partnership, has undertaken a study to look at just what the compatibility issues might be for an organisation wishing to employ virtualisation.
Pinnell explains that ChangeBASE AOK put a random sample of 100 applications through its AOK Virtualise-IT testing suite, and came up with results that will help organisations to understand what the answers to some of their questions might be, and also what they can do to enhance their use of virtualisation.
Using AOK, compatibility analysis reporting was predicated on two questions - what can be virtualised and how much effort, if any, will it be to get it working?
To answer the first called for testing for all the scenarios known to cause an application to fail to deploy in a virtual environment. This meant testing for conditions like "non-supported network updates" and "non-supported service installations".
In looking at how much work it would require to get applications that could be virtualised into a state where they were fit for deployment, an additional series of checks were done that looked for dependency requirements and compliance with best practice or vendor.
"Of the 100 sample applications looked at, it was found that 38 had compatibility issues that would prevent them from being virtualised, 49 could be virtualised but would need some remedial work, and 13 raised no issues and could be virtualised with no further work. So, roughly two-thirds of applications in the sample study were suitable for virtualisation, while approximately half would require some remedial work or planning for deployment with dependent components," says Pinnell.
In addressing the effort required to ready compatible apps for virtualisation, AOK ran an additional series of checks that looked for compliance with best practice or vendor recommendations to ensure that the application was appropriately configured, so that it would function correctly without any undesirable side effects and had all its dependencies available.
Of the issues and information messages that were raised, the largest single group was the identification of the need for MS office availability. This, Pinnell says, is interesting, as clients generally relate that the ability to be able to identify dependant middleware or missing dependencies is their greatest problem in deploying virtualisation.
"In summary, based on the AOK study, an organisation can expect to be able to find two-thirds of their estate compatible with virtualisation technologies and approximately half of those will require some remediation or dependency management. In answering the question about how much work it will be to ready the applications, it is clear that while there are a number of issues that will be raised, they can be remediated - many of them automatically - with the right tools."
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Gallium
Gallium, a member of the EOH group of companies, supplies Business Technology Optimisation Solutions from HP Software, specialised technology based professional services, training, managed services, test factory solutions and ad hoc quality and performance testing services.
EOH
EOH is a business and technology solutions provider creating lifelong partnerships by developing business and IT strategies, supplying and implementing solutions and managing enterprise-wide business systems and processes for medium to large clients.
EOH operates in the following three clusters of business units as a fully integrated business:
Technology - Through a number of subsidiary companies, EOH is able to sell, implement and support a range of world-class business applications including ERP, CRM, business intelligence, advanced planning and scheduling, e-commerce and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Consulting - Concentrated under the EOH Consulting brand are business units offering services ranging from strategic and business process consulting, project services, change management, supply chain optimisation and education.
Outsourcing - EOH offers comprehensive maintenance and support of client`s IT infrastructure and applications through the rendering of full IT outsourcing, application hosting and managed services. in addition eoh offers full business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
EOH has a presence in all major centres in South Africa and operates in the rest of Africa.
ChangeBASE AOK
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in London, England, ChangeBASE AOK is the provider and developer of AOK, software that automates the compatibility assessment, remediation, management and upgrade of applications in a Microsoft operating system or virtual environment. ChangeBASE AOK counts Dimension Data, SCC, Satyam, Getronics, Symantec, and Microsoft as its partners and Irish Life, Astra Zeneca and Old Mutual among its enterprise customers. For more information contact John Tate, Managing Director, on john.tate@changebase.com.
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