Organizations now have a wealth of tools available to help them take control of the data center. One of the most promising is virtualization. After all, virtualization addresses many of today's most immediate and pressing data center concerns. From helping reduce physical server sprawl to increasing operational efficiency and easing disaster recovery, virtualization can deliver bottom-line results - if managed properly.

But that's not all. Virtualization can also play a critical role in enabling organizations to invent an entirely new type of data center - one that can be dynamically recompiled to accommodate new sets of needs and requirements as business models shift. Even in a data center characterized more by disparate systems than consolidation, this new dynamically generated service delivery model based on software and virtualization will emerge and enable organizations to break away from the constraints of the traditional physical infrastructure.

Virtualization and Complexity
With the adoption of virtualization increasing, virtualization management is becoming a business priority. Virtualization started as a means for abstracting storage from physical hardware to ease complexity. Then IT began using virtualization in the data center for testing and development. Soon, server virtualization emerged, which allows for increased utilization and process isolation. Today, virtualization gives administrators the flexibility to move virtual machines among physical machines for maintenance or usage optimization.

Whether on the desktop or in the data center, virtualization adoption has increased awareness of the power of abstraction. The flexibility of decoupling the operating system from the physical hardware, applications from specific operating system installs, storage and networking resources from physical hardware, and even program threats from specific memory and CPU resources promises to continue to drive the demand for virtualization and the adaptability it offers.

At the same time, enterprises must take into account how the dynamic nature of virtualization compounds complexity. In fact, virtualization adoption makes management software all the more necessary to effectively manage, provision, track, configure, back up, and secure virtual environments to achieve the agility this technology promises. Organizations must manage the increased storage introduced by virtualization, manage the integration of security policies during the provisioning process, and then manage and track compliance against those security policies. Moreover, many virtualization platforms and vendors are emerging from VMware to Microsoft, Citrix, Sun, Oracle, and others, necessitating management tools that ensure interoperability.

Virtual server sprawl is already emerging as a significant challenge. While the hardware costs of server deployment decrease dramatically compared with deployment in a purely physical infrastructure, the increased deployment of virtual servers can lead to sprawl. Estimates are that production deployments will increase from 62 percent of new virtualized servers in 2006 to 92 percent in 2010. To deal with the growing number of servers and the physical and virtual infrastructures upon which they run, organizations require management tools.

In addition, because the planning and management of server and application deployment in virtualization environments is typically a manual consideration, automation tools represent a welcome addition to the IT toolbox. Administrators require tools that help them automate decisions about the distribution of virtual machines across physical and virtual infrastructures. From easing pre-consolidation planning to controlling virtual machine sprawl, isolating problems, maintaining end-user performance, and providing for effective chargebacks, automated virtualization management tools can help an IT organization address its most serious pain points.

Automation and SLAs
To create the data center of the future, enterprises need software that directs changing workloads to available resources. By using such software, IT can replace the chaotic nature of the data center with a streamlined management experience. This, in turn, frees up time for IT to focus on quality-of-service improvements and activities that squeeze out inefficiencies and deliver greater cost savings.

Indeed, to realize more fully the efficiencies and flexibility of virtualization, organizations can leverage the dynamic resource sharing (DRS) and data center automation (DCA) capabilities that are managed according to service level agreements (SLAs). These technologies enable enterprises to define SLAs independent of the virtualization, storage, and resource allocation platforms in use. They also provide a management infrastructure that can interact with the various platforms to enforce the policies of the SLAs automatically and dynamically.

These technologies can also help ease resource challenges. While IT does many management activities manually today, some organizations find that ensuring reliable and accurate SLA-based management requires a high degree of proficiency and expertise that is often difficult to find. However, by transitioning to management solutions that automatically enforce SLA requirements through programmatic interaction with a heterogeneous set of virtualization, storage, operating system, and other resource allocation platforms, organizations can make significant progress toward establishing a less complex, more efficient data center.

Meeting Business Objectives
Data centers have become complex, difficult to manage, and challenging to control. At the same time, however, service level expectations have continued to rise even as IT budgets remain relatively flat. As data centers evolve to address changing business needs, IT requires management tools that will reduce complexity, ensure availability, improve security and compliance, while driving improved efficiency and cost savings.

New solutions are emerging that simplify data center management by automating policy, deployment, provisioning, and other critical administrative tasks for both physical and virtual environments. As a result, IT professionals now require not only centralized management and configuration tools, but a solution that provides visibility across both physical and virtual environments.

With these capabilities in place, organizations will be able to use their resources in alignment with business objectives and build the data center of the future.