Partners' Role in Hardware Virtualization

Many organizations will want to work with an experienced consulting organization when adopting hardware virtualization on a large scale to help develop appropriate management policies and procedures and get tested, supported hardware configurations.

Because hardware virtualization technology can be easily understood, and the potential benefits of consolidating existing servers or improving production application efficiencies is fairly obvious, organizations might opt to deploy it fairly quickly. Those that do may encounter two problems:

Management policies and procedures. Organizations need to rethink how they manage systems when they introduce virtual machines (VMs). For example, VMs can proliferate more quickly than physical servers, even to a point where it may be hard to keep track of why a particular VM was created and what workloads it encapsulates. Procedures are needed to document the purpose, requirements, and licenses for each VM. Similarly, procedures and policies for operations likely need revision, too. For example, the current policies for server management and access may work for a physical network, but they may not be appropriate for a virtual network connecting VMs. Existing security policies for physical servers may not be adequate when there are both physical servers and VMs running server software and workloads. Organizations may need to update management and monitoring tools and documented procedures to ensure that they can support both their physical and virtual infrastructure.