Tim Howes, CTO of Opsware, recently sat down with me to discuss the subject of management within the virtualization space. Once you've gone down the road of virtualizing more than a single server, you quickly start to realize how important a good management solution becomes. InfoWorld Virtualization Report: Virtualization adoption is skyrocketing, but reality is that most of the deployments (nearly 80%) have bee Tim Howes, CTO of Opsware, recently sat down with me to discuss the subject of management within the virtualization space. Once you’ve gone down the road of virtualizing more than a single server, you quickly start to realize how important a good management solution becomes.InfoWorld Virtualization Report: Virtualization adoption is skyrocketing, but reality is that most of the deployments (nearly 80%) have been limited to test and development scenarios on a few hundred servers. What is preventing enterprises from rolling out virtualization technology in production environments?Opsware CTO Tim Howes: Rolling out virtualization on a large scale is easy. Managing a large virtualization deployment and the extra complexity it brings to an IT environment is hard. For the handful of organizations (about 20 percent) attempting large-scale deployments, the lack of enterprise class management tools has hindered success by increasing management costs and decreasing responsiveness and quality. This ultimately threatens the return on investment of virtualization itself. IVR: What are some of the main challenges associated with managing virtual machines?Tim Howes: The first challenge is that there are likely to be a lot of them. Creating virtual servers is easy to do and habit-forming, leading to an explosion of new virtual machines that must be managed. The second challenge is that VMs introduce a whole new set of relationships and dependencies that must be managed and understood, complicating tasks such as impact analysis and understanding virtual application compatibility. Finally, virtualization introduces new technology that must be managed, such as the hypervisor operating system. If virtualization is left unmanaged, it can lead to a variety of challenges ranging from unmanageable complexity, IT labor shortages, and security and service delivery problems on a global scale. IVR: How does Data Center Automation software help enterprises maximize their investment in virtualization technologies? Tim Howes: Data Center Automation is mature technology proven effective at reducing the complexity and cost of managing the physical world of servers, network devices and storage. On servers, the technology manages the entire lifecycle of server virtualization from provisioning and patching to compliance and configuration. For example, Opsware has added a new tool to its product family called Virtualization Director that provides all the capabilities necessary to manage large numbers of heterogeneous virtual systems deployed in multiple data centers, as well as the business-critical applications they support. This comprehensive server management system provides automated capabilities for creating, securing and controlling virtual servers. This includes discovering, visualizing and tracking dependencies between virtual and physical infrastructure elements and the applications they host, and standardizing management across both physical and virtual servers running on heterogeneous platforms throughout the enterprise.Data Center Automation enables IT enterprises to realize the true value of virtualization by minimizing the complexity that is often a result of the adoption of server virtualization. More and more end-users are realizing a need for automation, and that’s a trend that consistent across both physical and virtual servers. IVR: Do customers really need a virtualization management tool from an independent vendor? Why can’t the virtualization vendor provide this capability? Tim Howes: IT stands to benefit the most with a vendor-agnostic management platform that manages virtual machines from many vendors in once centralized location. This enables IT to ensure consistency and standardization of server builds which will lead to a higher quality and more reliable IT environment. An independent solution also allows IT to combine virtual server management with management of physical servers. Virtual and physical servers must cooperate seamlessly to serve the applications running on them. Nobody wants to go one place to manage their virtual machines and another to manage their physical machines. The whole point of virtualization is that you should not have to care. Only an independent vendor can provide this level of integration. The result is seamless integration that provides even greater efficiencies and cost savings across an enterprise’s global infrastructure. IVR: Why is management across virtual and physical machines critical for today’s enterprise?Tim Howes: Seamless management of virtual and physical servers is key to building a zero-latency data center – reaching deep into the applications that power today’s global enterprise. In contrast, with different solutions for physical and virtual machines, IT is burdened with an incomplete picture of the entire infrastructure that supports an application which ultimately could compromise core revenue-generating activities for the business, such as ensuring the ability for customers to place orders online. Seamless management for physical and virtual machines plays a critical role in helping companies comply with industry and government regulations, and ensuring the tightest level of security across the infrastructure. In the virtual/physical server world, IT’s ability to understand how a change on a virtual server may affect other parts of the application and vice-versa is critical. IVR: What will happen if enterprises don’t automate management of virtual machines now?Tim Howes: There are many consequences of not automating management of virtual machines, including widespread chaos and increased complexity across the data center. Just as IT cannot tolerate the risk of a missing security patch or misconfigured physical server, the same holds true for virtual servers. Unfortunately, this is an all too common occurrence in environments where virtual machines are not automated.Enterprises must also ensure their virtual machines are in compliance with government and industry regulations. Only through automation can enterprises accurately track and audit activity across the entire infrastructure, including virtual machines. If enterprises cannot show they are taking steps to ensure compliance of their virtual machines, they are opening themselves up to costly fines, delisting and potentially jail time. IVR: How has the market responded to Opsware’s Virtualization Director?Tim Howes: We’ve received an incredibly positive response to the introduction of Opsware Virtualization Director from current Opsware customers, as well as new customers who see the introduction of complexity caused by virtual servers as a reason to automate. Moving from a small, confined deployment to a large scale virtualization rollout can be intimidating for customers who need to ensure compliance, security and reporting policies. Opsware Virtualization Director provides a proven approach to server management that allows customers to create and maintain a significant amount of virtual servers completely integrated with the way they already manage their physical servers. In the end, this provides customers with the confidence to take their virtualization deployment to a whole new level.I’d like to thank Opsware CTO Tim Howes for speaking with me about this important topic. Software Development