A recent survey conducted by NetIQ has revealed that a high proportion of organisations have no processes in place to monitor the impact of moving to a virtualised environment on end-user response time of critical applications.
The survey of 102 IT managers across Europe has revealed that 64% are not presently using any tools to proactively gauge end-user response time before and after the migration to a virtualised environment.
These findings come as IDC recently reported that the pace of adoption of virtualised servers is "incredibly rapid" in organisations that are using virtualisation, and that 35% of servers deployed in 2007 were virtual. IDC also reported that 52% of servers deployed in 2008 are expected to be virtual.*
NetIQ's survey reveals that, in the UK, alone, 71% of respondents have no measures in place to monitor end-user performance before and after the migration to a virtual environment and just 15% of UK managers were actively considering a solution that would enable them to do this. Nearly a third of all UK respondents are only monitoring hardware performance and availability, rather than applications or OS, in the virtual infrastructure.
The survey also reveals that 90% of all UK respondents cited cost savings as the key driver for the move to a virtual environment; however, as Simon Ashford, technical specialist of NetIQ, warns, more planning and monitoring is needed if these potential savings are to be realised.
"Virtualisation is causing a big buzz with enterprises and can offer huge benefits in terms of cost savings and enabling a more efficient use of resources. However, these findings reveal that more needs to be done to monitor the impact of migration on end-user application response time otherwise any potential costs savings could be negated. What happens when a server is under heavy usage or pushed to the limits of its performance? A large proportion of organisations would be unable to measure any potential performance degradation which could be incredibly costly in terms of a user's productivity."
He added: "The virtual environment should provide the same if not greater levels of performance, availability and security as the physical environment - yet stringent planning and careful phasing are essential to evaluating project success and avoiding any potential performance pitfalls."
* Server virtualisation now firmly embedded in European organisations, according to IDC survey - 7 July
Share