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With physical servers often underutilized, commonly using 20 percent or less of capacity, virtualization seems to be the perfect solution. However, the ease at which companies can create virtual servers begets the chaos of virtual server sprawl.

The benefits of virtualization are numerous, but you can't manage what you can't measure. Provisioning, availability and performance can improve through virtualization efforts. But unanswered questions run the gamut from what's the performance impact to end users to what happens to availability as multiple applications are added to fewer platforms.

Containing virtual server sprawl
Performance management tools and techniques allow IT staff to identify potential problems and resolve them before service-level commitments are jeopardized. Performance issues can never be avoided completely because circumstances are constantly changing.

Several performance management techniques help keep virtual servers under control:

• Correlating performance data to locate the IT component that is the root cause of a problem
• Drilling down from an anomalous point on a performance graph to determine who or what is responsible for a bottleneck
• Watching trends and cycles in system performance and projecting future performance levels as compared to service levels specified in the service definition
• Analyzing trends to determine how best to ensure service levels will be met in the future
• Identifying underutilized capacity for potential redeployment
• Correlate business metrics with data

Also, with ongoing empirical data documenting the benefits of virtualization, you can construct a business case demonstrating to business unit managers the functional and economic value virtualization delivers.

Identify Virtualization Goals
Problem isolation, server failures, licensing compliance and utilization remain issues in the virtual world.

Companies must clearly identify the goal of their virtualization projects and why they are doing it. This helps determine how to successfully implement virtualization into an infrastructure and provides insight into its management.

For example, companies need to determine whether they're using it for better utilization of assets or isolation of applications or to cut down on floor space or energy.

These thoughts are what drive people with large farms of windows systems, migrating them on to VMware as an example.

Let's say you're interested in isolating applications that don't play well together. The virtualization platform you choose can take several standalone systems and put them together in logical partitions, zones or workload partitions which are ways of efficiently using hardware resources.

This is where the added benefits of flexibility occur. Users have flexibility in the methods of application isolation and administrative functions gain speed and agility.

However, you still have all your software assets in place if you're moving from a standalone server to a virtual guest or logical partition.

You still have costs for operating systems, databases and applications from an administrative point of view as well as a licensing point of view. And you'll still maintain that cost structure from your administration and software perspective.

This is where the added complexity and management nightmares creep up.

The nirvana in all of this lies in proper planning. Organizations must plan up front, define the goal and lay out their processes.

By taking the time up front, the organization will see how things will fit together and will be better able to effectively manage its virtualized environment.