By Tom Kearns

We all know that virtualization and Cloud technologies are hot IT topics. These technologies provide many benefits to organizations, helping them to reduce costs and better utilize their existing IT infrastructure investments.

Yet virtualization and private cloud technologies add new management challenges to the operations side of the house, even while they reduce setup, configuration, and deployment activities. The key thing to recognize is that the IT operations, compliance, and security challenges of physical IT infrastructure also exist in virtualized environments. IT Foundation Management delivers the same simplification, automation, documentation, and security benefits to virtualized environments as it does to physical ones.

For example, VM movement presents us with a unique challenge. When VMs move from physical machine to machine control, compliance and security should move with them. When changes are made to VMs and/or the underlying physical infrastructure, those changes need to be tracked, recorded, monitored, and correlated between physical and virtual assets. I’ll talk more about the security and compliance side of the issue in parts 2 and 3 of this blog.

For improving VM IT Operations, the challenge is really the gap between what you know and what you don’t know. There is a lot going on here and with VM technology being a relatively new technology, there are a lot of information gaps that can make it very difficult to know when a problem exists, what needs to be done, and what specific VM requires our attention.

This all starts to become clear when we recognize that virtual machines include operating systems, programs, applications, and other components. IT Foundation Management for Virtualization delivers an efficient and effective IT operations solution with automation, issue isolation, root cause analysis, and remediation; simplifying and expediting configuration, bulk patching, and VM issue resolution. The approach of IT Foundation Management includes physical and virtual assets to make sure that all of our daily administrative tasks are fully-supported with the tools and information needed to effectively and efficiently manage virtualization and Cloud technologies.

Read Part 2: Taming Virtualization. Part 2 – Virtual Machines (VMs) must be Compliant!