Risks of Server Virtualization

Risks of Server Virtualization are the increasing costs and operational risks, though Server virtualization can bring many benefits to the businesses. Server virtualization is often seen as universal weapon against the escalating IT costs and server complex structures. The dark side of the virtualization technology are the practical risks of server virtualization, apart from the technical and data center centric risks of virtualization itself or added by another cause.

Risks of Server Virtualization : Why Wordwide it is a Concern now

As said above, Server virtualization is often seen as an universal weapon against the escalating IT costs and server complex structures. The dark side of the technology and its use, however, are often ignored and they becomes the risks of server virtualization. For virtualized infrastructures, security problems, on high demands the reliability and disaster recovery to delicate licensing issues ; all bring their own difficulties. The potential benefits such as cost savings and flexible IT use can only reach those who know the risks and can avoid the typical pitfalls.

Risks of Server Virtualization

Risks of Virtualization starts with the recognition that many of the laws of physical machines and servers, which were each responsible for a single application are not applicable in virtualized environments. Many of the tools, organizational requirements and ways of thinking are no longer compatible with modern environments. The technology alone – the hypervisor -can bring a revolution in the data center and save recurrent costs. Brought in a nutshell: virtual is not physical.

While the disconnection between the server from hardware bring significant simplification and greater flexibility, there are demands on intelligent management and automation of the new environment. The ease with which servers to virtual machines (VMs) will be transferred at the end often requires more effort in the administration because of the fact that suddenly more (virtual) servers are available than before and thus the sheer mass of the systems becomes managed.

Related problems is a lack of overview – excessive consumption of disk space, update and care needs. Organizational measures and policies should be drawn from the outset in order to prevent this. In addition, organizations should evaluate suitable tools for managing virtual environments, to obtain technical support and assistance.

New capabilities such as flexible provisioning, preservation of images, the migration of VMs from one host to another require appropriate tools and new policies with which the control can be ensured over the entire system. Without standardization of processes and environments, nothing can be expected.

The dependence on a few servers makes them vulnerable. Virtualized environments take many servers together on a lot of hardware. This implies that many servers fail if one physical machine fails. Therefore high demands on the equipment and the mechanisms for high availability can be produced. UPON IT organizations need for shared storage in the form of a SAN (Storage Area Network), usually based on Fibre Channel and iSCSI technologies. The storage network must also be configured for high availability.

Server virtualization can not succeed without a sophisticated storage system. Local disk storage is not sufficient for advanced systems to meet the requirements of high availability, dynamic load balancing and high grade automation. Shared storage is an essential prerequisite. Especially in virtual environments, the memory requirements explode.

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