Life cycle management a must

By Staff Writer for FrontRange Solutions

Johannesburg, 13 Jul 2009

While virtualised environments offer simple administration, flexible business processes, and low operating and maintenance costs, they still need a structured client life cycle management approach, according to Scott Johnson, product manager at FrontRange Solutions.

In the rush to adopt the benefits of virtualisation, it's easy to underestimate the need for infrastructure and client life cycle management, notes Johnson, and organisations can easily be misguided.

He says the problem is exacerbated by vendors claiming that one key benefit of virtualisation is that it practically dissolves the need to manage the deployment of 'machines' and applications in the traditional sense.

According to Johnson, research conducted in August last year showed that 55% of organisations were actively employing virtualisation in their production environments, but nearly half of them had no tools in place to report on or manage virtual assets.

“This lack of a structured approach to managing virtual environments, as if they were the same as physical IT assets, can quickly lead not only to frustration, but even chaos in the IT organisation,” he says.

By adopting a proactive stance when managing both physical and virtual assets, adds Johnson, IT managers can ensure a sense of order prevails throughout the IT organisation.

An example of infrastructure management playing a critical role in managing virtualised environments is avoiding 'sprawl' - uncontrolled implementation of virtualisation which actually explodes IT costs and efforts to maintain it. “Sprawl not only potentially leads to a chaotic environment, it can also completely negate any intended cost savings the organisation was trying to achieve,” says Johnson.

Busting myths

Infrastructure management, he believes, can also help organisations avoid silos and disjointed asset management. “By managing physical machines or virtual assets, a consistent 'unified' management console can help avoid a fragmented approach to asset management. It enables IT staff to use just one management application to cover all aspects of the client life cycle,” he says.

“It's a myth that virtual environments require no maintenance or downtime,” Johnson adds. He stresses that critical maintenance is necessary to ensure continued peak performance and that IT is keeping pace with business needs.

According to Johnson, there is no doubt that virtualisation has many benefits, but to believe the hype that virtualisation eliminates the need for careful asset and life cycle management is wrong. “If anything, the virtual environment needs even more careful control in order to prevent it 'sprawling' in a way that was never intended,” he concludes.