Business beats govt in virtualisation

CDW Government's recent Government Virtualisation Report indicates the private sector has moved further and faster with virtualisation technology than its governmental counterparts, writes eChannel Line

Approximately 66% of federal, state and local government agencies are implementing or have completed implementation of server virtualisation, compared to 90% of business entities. In addition, the studies found 54% of businesses have completed their deployment, compared to 16% of government agencies.

And just 33% of government agencies employ a 'virtualisation first strategy', meaning the agency must prove that a new software application does not work in a virtualised environment before the agency will buy a dedicated server to support it," compared to 89% of businesses.

Virtualisation, or the implementation of a private cloud, is a 'key enabler' for businesses to get the most out of cloud computing, according to one expert, says Rackspace.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia, Howard Elias, president of information infrastructure at EMC, said: "virtualisation by itself is not the total solution to getting to this cloud-type environment, but it is the key enabler."

Elias was responding to recent findings by Forrester Research, which indicated that businesses would be looking to lessen their annual expenditure on IT maintenance. Traditionally, companies have allotted 70% of their IT budgets to 'keep the lights on' - or perform essential maintenance and provide support.

Endpoint security software is not built with desktop virtualisation in mind, and this is proving to be one of the biggest management challenges in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments today, states ZDNet.

According to Richard Sheng, Trend Micro's Asia-Pacific regional director for business development and product marketing, because existing endpoint security tools are unable to recognise the presence of virtual machines, they contend for resources at the CPU, storage and network levels.

On physical machines, such utilisation of resources would not be significant, but in desktop virtualisation (where multiple desktops are co-located on one physical server) the base load on that machine is considerably more strenuous.