Interop: Many Problems Among Virtualization's Gains

Virtualization may be taking the IT world by storm, but many organizations aren't getting the cost and resource savings promoted by the champions of virtualization, according to a study released at the Interop Conference and Expo in Las Vegas this week.

The onsite survey of 120 network engineers, IT managers, and executives attending Interop was conducted by Network Instruments. The survey found that 55% of respondents had more problems than benefits with virtualization. About 45% said they are getting the benefits of virtualization.

"Many of the people we're speaking with have implemented virtualization, but often lack of visibility is keeping them from realizing the benefits of the technology," Charles Thompson, Network Instruments' product manager, said in a statement. "Not surprisingly, a high number of companies have deployed critical network services on virtual machines. Without proper tools, application performance can unnecessarily degrade and network teams waste hours troubleshooting."

The survey found that 55% of the respondents have mission-critical virtualized servers, including e-mail and Web servers. Also, 50% run DNS and DHCP in other virtualized servers. Nearly 40% extended virtualization to desktop configurations.

Asked to cite the most glaring problem of virtualization, 59% of the respondents indicated they lack experience to manage the technology appropriately, while too high deployment costs were cited by 47% as a problem.

As for troubleshooting, 27% complained of a lack of visibility and tools as a problem in that category. Additional troubleshooting problems cited were lack of virtual infrastructure training, noted by 26%, and an inability to secure infrastructure, 21%.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on server virtualization. Download the report here (registration required).