For several years, midmarket companies have been taking the first steps to embracing virtualisation, but many do not know what to do next.
Companies were eager to hop on the virtualisation bandwagon after seeing what incredible benefits it could bring but, unsure of how to proceed, companies have been left not knowing how best to leverage their new virtualisation platform. What follows are two possible next steps that midmarket companies should consider to continue their virtualisation journey.
Operations Management
Virtualisation technology has introduced a number of improvements to midmarket data centres, but it has also brought on certain challenges – such as monitoring utilisation and "VM sprawl". Virtualisation changes everything, not just the foundations of IT infrastructure but also the culture and how IT is perceived within the business.
As a result, the speed of adoption of virtualisation and the complexity of the technology has outpaced the capabilities within a company's IT department to manage these problems. Companies need to adapt the way they monitor and manage their virtual environments. There are many monitoring tools available; however, not all are created equal, some specialise in capacity analysis and others are made for general monitoring and alerting.
Given that a large majority of companies use VMware vSphere as their hypervisor, it comes as no surprise that VMware has also released an operations management tool – vCenter Operations Manager. This management tool provides insight into workload, capacity and health that are crucial to gaining the necessary visibility into performance bottlenecks and leveraging recommendations for problem resolution.
IT admins are now able to fully understand the impact and root cause of the issues before the entire business is affected, reducing the amount of time spent troubleshooting and achieving higher utilisation and savings.
Desktop Virtualisation
With more and more people working from home or on the road, there has never been a greater demand for technology to support mobility and collaboration. In many cases, employees have resorted to bringing their own devices with them to work to simplify their mobile experience, which introduces a new challenge; work that was previously confined to a single desktop PC or laptop is now being taken outside the secure confines of a company's building.
The variety of devices now rife within a business increases support problems and also intensifies the likelihood of data breaches caused by lost or stolen devices. The solution to many of these issues is to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Moving computing resources back into the data centre makes them significantly easier to manage and control, all while improving the efficiency of both technology and personnel resource utilisation.
This solution provides greater flexibility for end users to access applications and empowers employees to choose their own devices, all while ensuring a flexible, secure workspace with a high-quality user experience.
These are just two of the many topics that could be covered in regards to virtualisation, but they remain important considerations for your next steps to getting the most out of virtualisation.
- Anthony Poh is a Technical Account Manager at MTI Technology, and has over 12 years of experience in the IT industry specialising in infrastructure consolidation and virtualisation
