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Enterprises committed to a virtualisation strategy should plan for management and provisioning of mission-critical business applications as well as IT infrastructure technologies.

Establish procedures that let you maximise the benefits of consolidating on to a virtualised platform and mitigate potential business risk.

Spiralling energy costs and environmental concerns have shifted virtualisation from a commodity tool to centre stage role in many organisations.

Virtualisation was born in the 1970s with mainframe computers being virtually partitioned to host multiple guest machines. It proved an ideal environment to install and configure new operating platforms, upgrade existing systems and allow software developers a sand-box for isolation testing.

In its 21st century incarnation, virtualisation usually starts deep within the datacentre. IT operations and application development teams recognise the extra flexibility from not needing extra hardware for software testing or to service ad-hoc processing demands.

All IT layers within an enterprise must be aligned to perform in a new virtualised landscape. Underlying IT infrastructure components must be in place each time a new virtual machine is provisioned and business applications, operational processes and procedures must be established to provide the services end-users rely on.

Virtualisation transforms a datacentre into a dynamic IT environment that can provide the flexibility and scalability of the global marketplace.

Challenges accompany the agility. As each new server is deployed, IT operations must recognise that there is an extra machine to manage and monitor.

Skills shortage

Increased workload and a lack of personnel can put pressure on many organisations’ IT operations. Instead of continually trying to find, train and retain staff, organisations need to incorporate into the fabric of their virtualised environments the tribal systems management knowledge that has accumulated over many years.

An automated approach would reduce operational pressures and reduce the exposure of critical systems and applications to unaccountable manual intervention.

Automation can help ensuring that extra virtual machines are brought on line to cater for peak processing demands, optimise the distribution of batch jobs to complete ahead of critical deadlines through to automatically responding and taking corrective actions against errors.

Beyond the infrastructure layer, an equivalent set of tasks and procedures drive application processing and have traditionally relied upon manual interaction, either by datacentre or end-user personnel.

Application virtualisation generates a similar set of challenges that requires equal attention if enterprises are to benefit.

In virtualised environments, fixed relationships between hardware, systems and applications no longer exist. Hard-wired, proscribed associations, ranging from a command sequence in an operations handbook to fixed parameters embedded in a piece of application code, can result in different interpretations when presented in a virtualised world.

Virtualisation introduces an extra layer of abstraction between physical hardware devices and the software systems that an enterprise runs to support its business.

At the IT infrastructure management layer, housekeeping and administrative tasks need to be executed: back-ups, snapshots, database clean-ups, file transfer handling, starting and stopping of virtual machines.

At the business application layer, functional processes and procedures need to be undertaken: sales data uploads, order processing, invoicing, logistics, production, analytics and forecasting, finance and accounting, human resources and customer care.

The scope of activities required will usually go well beyond the capability of an individual business application or systems management solution.

Enterprises need to manage all the interfaces around their virtual environments. They also need to be able to integrate the real and virtual environments so they can get the greatest breadth and the depth of functionality from their core applications and operating platforms.

Forming logical association and using logical views when managing virtualised systems and applications will help IT departments achieve greater flexibility and agility.

When seeking to automate IT housekeeping procedures through to business processes, such as closing off the end of a financial quarter, a centralised single set of policy definitions with embedded parameter variables ensures consistency and transparency across all virtualised machines and hypervisors.

It will also reduce maintenance and administration overheads.

Establishing the availability of virtual resources, determining current systems performance and analysis of other metrics can be used at run-time to optimise routing and dispatching of workload.

Process definitions can be dynamically configured using parameter overrides to run in the virtualised infrastructure best suited to ensure end-user service level agreements (SLAs) are satisfied.

Securing and administering all process definitions in a centralised repository will support change control management. There is no need to manually check that script updates, necessary because a new version of a backup utility is being rolled out, have been propagated to all virtual machines.

Critical activities run on virtual machines are protected against unauthorised updates and illegal use.

Being able to maintain a record and report on all changes made to process definitions, as well as details of who executes what, where, when and the outcome, supports enterprises in ensuring that their use of virtualisation does not introduce additional operational risk and compliant with IT governance strategy.

Enterprise-wide visibility of application and infrastructure activities is crucial when managing and monitoring workload that spans virtual machines.

IT operations and application support teams could also benefit from a set of platform- and application-agnostic tools that allows them to deal with problems when they arise.

Get more agile

A layer of abstraction that enables the logical mapping of critical IT processes can provide increased levels of agility and flexibility when automating the execution of workload across virtual machines.

Associating logical processes with physical resources dynamically by setting parameter overrides enables greater agility.

Creating templates of common processes that can be executed repeatedly – on behalf of multiple business units, for instance – allows enterprises to scale their operations without adding significant overheads.

Automation can simplify management and control of virtual machines.

Instead of dusting down an old IT operations run-book and updating it to support its virtualisation strategy, enterprises need to realise that embedding knowledge and experience into automated procedures not only simplifies management and control of a virtualised world.

It can also ensure smart decisions are taken at the right time in the right context. An automated approach translates to improved throughput, greater accuracy, fewer errors and reduced risk.

Putting technology to work by allowing it to analyse resource utilisation and respond instantaneously, provisioning extra resource in a virtualised environment enhances productivity.

Alan Smith is senior vice-president of UC4 Software