CA Automating Virtualization Management

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2 CA – Automating Virtualization Management © Butler Direct Limited

Written by: Roy Illsley

Published March 2009 © Butler Direct Limited

All rights reserved. This publication, or any part of it, may not be reproduced or adapted, by any method whatsoever, without prior written Butler Direct Limited consent.

THE EXPANSION OF X86 VIRTUALIZATION

The economics of globalization demand that organizations adapt business models and working practices more rapidly than previous paradigm shifts have required, which can be summarized by the need to be more responsive, more agile, and more cost effective. The role of IT is now central to many organizations and as such is seen as the catalyst for transforming organizations’ future prospects; virtualization of the x86 market has presented a plethora of new opportunities that IT departments must prioritize and harness if they are to drive the organization forward. Butler Group has identified three key opportunities that virtualization offers organizations wanting to operate effectively in the new global economy, and these can be categorized as: automation, flexibility, and business alignment. However, all of these need the technology to be managed effectively so that they can deliver against the promise. While many virtualization reports are focused on the reduction in Run The Business (RTB) costs enabled by increasing the utilization of the server estate, and by implication reducing the overall power consumption, we believe those benefits to be widely understood, and advocate that organizations to look beyond this use of virtualization towards how it and systems management can transform an organization’s ‘modus operandi’ and hence its future prosperity.

According to Datamonitor research 70% of the cost of running a data center is attributed to the people costs, and many research projects have found that on average 80% of all system outages are due to human error. Therefore, the ability to automate the delivery of services, the change process, and the dynamic use of resources represents a major opportunity for IT not only to reduce the RTB costs, but also to increase the service levels, enabling its end users to be more productive and innovative in how IT is used.

Agility and flexibility are terms that have been used so often by technology vendors that their impact on CIOs has been eroded; however, where real agility can be delivered, and when it is combined with automation, organizations are transformed. While it is true to say that x86 virtualization enables agility, it is not correct to say that it equals agility. Butler Group considers the role of systems management as the ultimate tool that provides the technology-agnostic management capability needed to orchestrate the environment and deliver true agility to the enterprise.

Until recently only mainframe and enterprise-class server users have been able to easily flex the IT resources so that their performance and service levels are aligned with the business objectives. However, as x86 virtualization has evolved, this capability has become available to a much wider audience. The biggest question often heard is “so how do I align my IT resources with my organization objectives, then?“ the answer is to use tools that have the visibility from an end-user perspective of the level of service received, the ability to prioritize workload automatically based on high-level business rules, and the underlying technology infrastructure that enables its resources to be dynamically adjusted based on the interpretation of these rules. We believe that only a few system management vendors have the current capability and future vision that support this need to manage transformational technologies from a business perspective.

The Transformational Impact of x86 Virtualization on Management

Many long-serving IT practitioners can remember when numerous organizational IT departments were run in a rather ‘seat-of-the-pants’ fashion, with little regard for standards, formal processes, or quality-control procedures – flexible perhaps, but unreliable as well. However, today many organizations have deployed not only standard processes and procedures based on frameworks like ITIL®, but they also use systems and data center management tools in an attempt to make IT more reliable and predictable and to further ITIL® goals/maturity.

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This situation has created its own set of problems, most notably the fact that more and more technologies have been developed and deployed, each with its own management capability, and that these products are often add-ons to an existing complex data center management picture. This is characterized by the siloed nature of the tools and those operational teams that use them, which provides a lack of consistency in the way the technology is managed, and this adds to the complexity and cost of managing a data center. Consider the task of starting Virtual Machines (VMs): each vendor has its own set of instructions and interfaces with which administrators control and manage the operation. Butler Group believes that the time has come to think strategically about systems and data center management, and how they can be used in a coordinated, automated, and effective manner to deliver real business benefit. Some leading vendors, such as CA, have strategies and solutions that are designed to operate at this level within enterprise deployments.

Traditionally, organizational IT structures have evolved based on these siloed tools and are often characterized by many different siloed teams of technical specialists; these silos often drive the technology selection process within an organization, which to a large extent is governed by the existing skills within the organization’s IT department. This approach has created tensions between the requirements of the business users and the capabilities of the IT department to manage the technology. The result of this siloed approach is that IT resources are locked into technologies, and organizations face expensive retraining or new hiring costs if technologies new to the organization are selected. At Butler Group we believe the new, more holistic approach to systems management – where the simplification of management activities enables the IT department to manage the technology stack at a higher level, and therefore enables it to manage a wider range of technologies more efficiently – is an important new development that will help take IT departments to the next level in terms of exploiting virtualization across systems, storage, network, desktop, and application infrastructures, for business benefit.

We term this new approach ‘Business Technology’, where through the use of new technical capabilities (such as x86 virtualization) empowerment of the end user is enabled. However, to fully exploit this paradigm shift that virtualization exposes, organizations must revise the way in which their computing is funded and managed. This involves moving from a project focus to a usage-based scenario, which requires management tools to not only understand what is happening, but also what resources are being consumed to provide a level of service. Key technology requirements to enable the usage-based scenario are integrations and policy and models-based management engines.

The Growing Significance of Automation

The potential for virtualization to be a transformational technology is dependent on how it links with the business requirements, which the technology itself does not do but any management layer must. Butler Group has used the term ‘Infrastructure Orchestration’ (see Figure 1) as the capability needed to link the high-level business investment and strategy tools (such as CA Clarity PPM), with the IT Service Management (ITSM) tools (such as CA Service Desk Manager) and Service Assurance and Business-Driven Automation (CA Wily Application Performance Management, CA Spectrum® Infrastructure Manager and CA Spectrum® Automation Manager). We believe that only an intelligent middle layer that can use the business language and variable business priorities and policies, as well as understanding the infrastructure resources available, can successfully enable organizations to deliver the quality of service to the end users in line with their expectations and with the organization’s stated costs.



Figure 1 Infrastructure Orchestration (Source: Butler Group)

We believe that this business link is the missing component from many leading vendors’ systems management solutions, and yet while many vendors have embraced virtualization, they have done so from a technical perspective. Butler Group considers this to be at odds with what the end-user organizations are demanding in terms of business focus on how IT is used and delivered. We further believe that, as the economic conditions make growth prospects less likely, organizations will be looking to IT for leadership in obtaining a differentiated or innovative solution to drive the business to be more profitable.

Therefore, the role of automation becomes more central to the management activities: as only by being capable of taking preventative action based on real-time information can IT provide the platform needed for organizations to be more responsive to market conditions. The role of automation has seen it move away from the early concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where human-like responses were assumed to be the way forward towards a more pragmatic approach based on a system’s ability to learn the required behaviors from a series of high-level rules or objectives. This approach takes a biological cell-like view – based on the concept of a cell performing a single function that can be combined with others in a sequence to generate a solution to a particular problem. The systems management tools are beginning to embed this capability in products – such as security products like CA IAM Suite, where a system knows normal behavior in terms of login attempts and if it sees this pattern being altered it assumes a Denial of Service (DoS) attack has been instigated and shuts down the ability to access corporate systems – to deliver the kind of systems automation needed to manage the virtual resources dynamically and to ensure that systems availability is maximized.

THE CHALLENGES OF MANAGING IN A VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT

Managing in a virtualized environment has a number of specific and unique challenges, and these are as much about having a tool as they are about having well-defined IT processes and procedures. The implementation of virtual environments has been characterized as an ‘add-on’, and not as a strategic core deployment; this adoption approach has created the conditions that have produced the issues and divisions at the management layer currently experienced by many early adopters. One of the biggest challenges is how to mitigate the risk of deploying a new technology that by its very nature introduces additional layers of technology to make the solution more flexible from an end user’s perspective.



Butler Group advocates that organizations select any systems management tool carefully, ensuring that it meets at least these three basic objectives: that it makes the management tasks simpler; that it provides a comprehensive set of capabilities; and that it is fully integrated (this does not necessarily mean it must be a single vendor’s solution, rather it must have the ability to use and share information easily, i.e., integrated physical and virtual management.

Organizations are looking for a simple, integrated capability for the entire data center, so any tool must manage physical and virtual platforms, and offer customers the opportunity to integrate across disciplines. Point solutions that are solely focused on virtual environments create the very problem that virtualization is designed to eradicate: the isolation of data, and fragmented management.

Security is always a concern, but in a virtual environment this assumes a new significance: the Hypervisor executes under the operating system, which means the operating system does not know it exists. Therefore, the Hypervisor, or its technology, represents a new threat, one where a root-kit malware could potentially reside undetected by traditional security products. Butler Group believes that virtualization needs new solutions to solve these new security challenges, and any systems management tool must recognize that current techniques may not be appropriate in a virtual environment.

Virtualization enables many more organizations to invest in the use of automation and service management; however, automation requires a source of data that can support its decisions, and a set of rules or policies that guide the automated decision making process. When this is combined with a services perspective, any tool must support the level of control, and hence collect data at the correct level of granularity, to enable the services to be managed effectively. The ability to understand, in near real time, how IT services are performing and incorporate this knowledge into automated workflows is a paramount management requirement.

Another, often overlooked, aspect of managing in a virtualized environment is how the change process is affected: VMs can effectively operate on any physical server; therefore, any change could impact all the other VMs. This level of complexity requires the organization to have mature discovery, change, and configuration processes as well as a tool that can monitor and track the changes and configurations of every VM, guest operating system, host operating system, and physical server.

While much of the debate surrounding virtualization management is centered on the technology and the tools, the cultural impact of virtualization must not be overlooked. Butler Group believes that before an organization moves to a virtualized infrastructure it must ensure that it can transparently allocate the cost of a service to a department via a chargeback mechanism, which in most organizations represents the biggest area of disagreement between IT and its business users: how these costs are calculated and attributed to end-user departments.

The other cultural impact that any tool should address is that of control: currently, if a head of a department agrees to a project with IT, they (the end-user department) fund the project and that typically means they purchase a new server and assume some responsibility and control for how the server is used. However, in a virtualized environment the end-user department will have a share of a pool of resources, and not a physical asset. Therefore, comprehensive management reporting and an agreed business-led process to oversee any reallocation of resources are required.

Some of the challenges that have been highlighted as peculiar to virtualization technologies involve a number of disciplines that traditional systems management tools have all evolved to address over the preceding years, but in a virtual world these solutions are no longer valid. Butler Group believes that only those vendors that have the vision to build new solutions, particularly in automation, performance and availability, license and patch management, and VM change and configuration management space, will be the systems management vendors that dominate as they will provide a holistic solution for the entire data center, whether that be physical or virtual.



Integrated Fault and Performance Management

In the traditional client-server infrastructure the ratio of one application to one physical server is common. This approach provides a high degree of consistency and predictability in the interactions between the three layers of the stack: application, operating system, and hardware. The advantages provided by this level of predictability include ensuring that the performance of the server is optimized for the application. However, this set-up is expensive in terms of resource consumption, and does not support the concept of resource pooling – where unused and under-utilized resources can be allocated to other applications.

In the virtual world this one-to-one, predictable relationship is replaced with a more fluid relationship, which has a third element introduced into the equation; namely a guest operating system. This relationship creates a number of unique challenges. One of the primary reasons that virtualization is adopted is to increase server utilization rates; therefore, meeting both high availability of applications and high server utilization is a specific challenge. Any management tool must be capable of understanding the relative priority of applications, and also be able to associate applications as components in a business service. It is this latter requirement that causes the biggest problems, because in order to guarantee a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a business service within a finite capacity server estate that is optimally utilized, there will be winners and losers, so the allocation of relative priority becomes a critical task that the systems management tool must perform. To accomplish this, performance management must be integrated with fault management to drive a consolidated business and IT impact view.

In the physical world network separation is relatively simple, and enables the different segments to be isolated from each other by using Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) or Firewalls. However, it is not particularly easy to change, management is at best clumsy, these segmentation techniques can also represent a security risk, and they are difficult to scale. In the virtual world network segmentation is still required, but because the VMs are dynamic in nature – one VM may be used in the day and a second at night and they may have different network segmentation requirements – physical methods are not appropriate. VLANs are the most-used method of providing virtual network segmentation, but these still suffer from the same issues as in the physical world. In recent years, new, centrally-managed security and network management systems have been developed so as to provide a more dynamic and secure approach to virtual network segmentation. Virtualization is driving the need for more sophisticated network management requirements with new approaches utilizing models-based management.

Increasingly, organizations are looking to ensure that not only are they utilizing their servers efficiently, but that the servers that are executing the services are the most energy-efficient servers. Butler Group believes that although energy prices have fallen from a peak in the summer of 2008, many organizations expect fluctuations in the price to continue; therefore, we expect energy costs to become a significant aspect of running an organization’s data center, which will require a management tool to analyze and automate how the resources are used. Another aspect of energy is the ability of the power companies to distribute it to the city center locations where the major organizations operate; for example, in London (England) the 2012 Olympics have put a strain on the existing power distribution infrastructure, so much so that the previous Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, stated that no new data centers could be built in the city until post 2012.

Another complication that any performance monitoring capability must be aware of in a virtual world is the limitations of where VMs can execute. Currently no standard exists (the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) v1.0 was launched in September 2008, but is a very rudimentary standard at this stage) so that any VM can execute on any Hypervisor installed on any hardware. In fact, VMware has only recently announced (September 2008) that its VMotion product will operate across different processor chipset generations (Intel only) if the new Intel 7400 chip is used. Previously, VMs could only move using VMotion between chipsets of the same manufacturer and the same generation.

The principal benefit of server virtualization has been the increased utilization rates achievable; however, increasing the amount of work a server performs is not universally a positive outcome. The principal drawback that most organizations have discovered is that the ability to back up and restore files is now more complex; this was previously performed during quiet times – normally in the late evening when the server was completely inactive. Butler Group believes that any good systems management tool should address this issue, as well as the wider issue of managing the Disaster Recovery (DR), High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and Business Continuity (BC) opportunities that virtualization provides.



In fact many organizations report that DR is often used as the ‘on ramp’ for many virtualization projects, which should not be a surprise as DR, HA, FT, and BC have many proven benefits that organizations consider valuable, but could probably not afford to implement previously.

Butler Group research indicates that it is the Small to Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) sector which is embracing how virtualization can provide a cost-effective solution in this space. However, we believe that many organizations lack the management maturity required to implement and execute these capabilities successfully. In our experience, identifying the differences between the capabilities, and providing the information on when, and if, to execute, requires a significant level of organizational maturity with respect to process and procedures; however, we consider that a good systems management tool can simplify matters, making the execution of any DR, HA, FT, or BC plan require less in the way of process maturity.

Analytical and Monitoring Capabilities

VMs provide the organization with a flexible and easy-to-deploy approach to application delivery; however, this benefit also has a significant drawback that must be recognized and mitigated. By the very nature of its ease and speed of deployment a VM can very quickly multiply into hundreds of VMs, and therein lies the problem; this is termed ‘VM sprawl’, which is a self-generated condition not unlike the server sprawl that many organizations suffer from today. However, VM sprawl has one distinct difference: you can send a person out to count and record all physical servers, but the same is not true for VMs.

This issue brings understanding the lifecycle of a VM into focus, Figure 2 shows the Butler Group VM model; this model covers the attributes and actions needed to successfully manage VMs throughout their lifecycle.

Figure 2: Virtual Machine Lifecycle Process (Source: Butler Group)

Butler Group believes that the process of managing VMs shares a significant degree of similarity to that of managing any application deployment. However, we also believe that it differs in a number of key areas particularly in the technical evaluation of the VM and environment, which will identify any operational restrictions that may be forced on the VM, such as compatible hardware, virtual file systems, and Hypervisors on which the VM can execute. The other significant difference is that of review and documentation, because only by constantly maintaining up-to-date records can VMs be retired safely.



For example, consider the VM that is only used once a year in year-end processing: if only a time attribute is used to control VMs then this VM may be deleted just because it has been inactive for more than 90 days, say; obviously this would only be identified as a problem during year-end processing when the VM failed to initiate. This example demonstrates the need for application dependency mapping as the part of any VM management capability.

Managing VMs requires knowledge of current location; this may sound simple but in environments where live migration – the ability to move a running VM from one physical server to another automatically – is used then some method of having visibility across the entire estate is needed. This situation is further complicated by the need to manage the VMs with a full knowledge of relationships between guest environments and the host environment, as well as how they relate to the underlying physical infrastructure. This increases the levels of complexity involved from a purely physical environment, where any change or configuration is fixed on a specific physical server. In order to provide a reliable change and configuration capability in this new mixed physical and virtual data center any systems management tool requires a policy-driven approach. Butler Group considers this a significant aspect that end-user organizations must consider when selecting any management tool for a mixed, heterogeneous, data center environment.

Change management is typically associated with standard repeatable processes, such as ITIL®, and a data repository, such as a Change and configuration Management DataBase (CMDB). Managing change or configurations in a virtual environment is no different, it is just that the level of complexity is increased, which requires the CMDB to have a greater capacity to perform advanced analytics on the Configuration Items (CIs).

Butler Group advocates that any CMDB operating in a mixed virtual and physical environment must capture “who“ has made the changes, “what“ was changed, “when“ this change happened, “how“ this change was implemented, and “where“ this change was made. We believe that this enables IT organizations to ensure that deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Therefore, it is imperative that any tool can track changes based on a number of different attributes, such as: the role of the user and their associated permissions, the templates used to deploy VMs, any guest VMs executing on an organization’s estate, the offline systems (such as high availability and disaster recovery), the data stores attached to all physical hosts, all available resource pools, and the repository that contains the scheduled and on-demand tasks. Additionally, it is also worth noting that any tool must be able to identify new users that have been created, edited, or deleted, and any new hosts that have been added.

Managing Migration between Physical and Virtual Environments

Tools to convert Physical-to-Virtual (P2V), Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V), and Virtual-to-Physical (V2P) are essential in a virtualized data center. Costs and features do vary, and so IT technicians should think about their requirements and then review market offerings in order to understand what each vendor has to offer. For example, the one-time conversion of a physical server to a virtual server might be well suited to a particular organization, but the conversion of servers to-and-fro (P2V, V2V, and V2P) might be a better match. No one vendor has the optimum solution for all use cases, and so full consideration of the features/costs should be given.

In the virtualization market, where a great deal of up-front effort is put into the migration from physical to virtual, there may come a time when an encapsulated system needs to be moved back to physical hardware. Moreover, there is also the likelihood of wanting to move between vendor solutions, especially if a vendor’s strategy moves away from its original course. By catering for these eventualities, organizations avoid potentially costly ‘lock-in’ and also maintain a degree of freedom and flexibility.

Virtualization is about encapsulating physical devices in a binary file, and then providing a runtime platform for these files; and so, with server and desktop virtualization in particular, there tends to be a virtual disk format and a configuration file that goes with it. Tools already exist to convert from one format to another, but again features and costs do vary. Organizations with a variety of virtualization products should invest in a solution that fully supports Configuration and Change Management (CCM) and the notion of some kind of repository or library, or, ideally, it should link into any service management toolset.



License and Patch Management

As previously mentioned, managing the relationship between hardware, host operating system, and guest operating system is one of the added complications that managing in a virtualized world brings. One of the biggest issues that this scenario highlights is that of patch management, because as the VM moves between different physical servers, so the relative patch levels between the hardware and other applications become confused and hence difficult to manage. Therefore, it is essential that any tool can track patch levels to guest and host operating systems, and provide the information on any inconsistencies or vulnerabilities to the management tool.

Another significant problem associated with how easy it is to start a VM is license compliance; as most organizations struggle to manage their plethora of software licenses, VMs only exacerbate the problem without a well-defined process. In fact it is not just that organizations may be using more licenses than they pay for: they may actually be paying for licenses that they do not use.

As organizations look to reduce the administration costs associated with deploying applications (especially to desktops) so the use of user self-service has seen a dramatic increase. This approach does yield many savings for the IT department, such as reducing the errors from installing and configuring applications that traditionally require elevated privileges and some technical capability. However, it equally raises a number of issues that must be addressed – and Butler Group believes that a good systems management tool will assist significantly with these: firstly, who is responsible for restoration of the applications a user has installed should their system require re-building; secondly, does the tool used to administer the self-service site include an automatic license and compliance capability; and finally, is the business happy that the responsibility has moved from IT to the operational business unit in terms of how services are delivered and deployed? This situation is exacerbated when DR is taken into account, as some VMs may be situated in two locations, but only used in one at a time.

Management tools used in this space should ideally be sourced from an independent vendor, as problems can be created if proprietary vendor tools are used as point solutions; if a new technology is introduced – by a merger or acquisition for example – then another tool set will be needed. The other complication with point solutions is that ideally the IT department should operate standard processes and procedures, such as ITIL®, which enable organizations to automate the flow of data between different teams.

HOW TO MAKE THE BENEFITS TANGIBLE

According to Datamonitor’s key trends survey of 2008 the major IT strategic objectives for 2009 are consolidating existing systems and standardizing the infrastructure. This view is supported by other findings in the survey, see Figure 3, which show that nearly 35% of respondent organizations are looking to invest in systems management capability in the next 24 months so that they can extract the value from their strategic objectives.



Figure 3: Systems Management Spending Survey (Source: Datamonitor)

The overriding message from the survey, which is compiled from interview data with global CIOs, is that technologies such as virtualization can certainly deliver significant benefits, particularly in terms of cost reduction as well as enabling increased flexibility. However, these CIOs have recognized that the technology is only part of the equation, and that in order to deliver these benefits a management capability is required. Butler Group considers that while some vendors operate at a technology and management level, it is those vendors that have a heritage and focus on management which provide the most comprehensive tools aimed at maximizing value from the heterogeneous data center which most organizations currently operate.

Butler Group believes that process automation represents one of the most valuable, yet untested, next-level benefits from deploying management in the x86 virtualization market. We consider that integrating any data center management tool that covers both the physical and virtual environments with a CMDB capability enables organizations to add intelligent, policy-based decision making, thereby making process automation a reality.

The overriding message from all these technologies is that it is the management layer where the value, cost saving, or benefit will be seen and calculated; therefore, Butler Group believes that 2009 will see a re-emergence of systems management tools and the concept of a “Manager of Managers“. We believe that as organizations look to reduce the number of point solutions from vendors with their own management console, and combine this with the increased business focus being placed on IT, these will be the driving forces behind the movement towards a simplified and unified concept of Integrated Systems Management (ISM), which we anticipate will begin to emerge in 2009. However, ISM will not be characterized by a rip-and-replace approach, rather organizations will expect existing tools to work together; system management tools will be judged on the user interface and ease of integration as well as the capabilities provided.



Management Reduces the Risks of an Expanding Virtualization Footprint

Butler Group believes that before any organization can fully realize the benefits from virtualization, or any other technology, it must first understand its current position. This may sound a basic requirement, but research has shown that understanding the apportionment of the costs associated with providing the computing resources to end users remains, for some organizations, a challenge they have not resolved.

We consider that understanding where the potential inefficiencies are with what is being delivered today is an excellent starting position. Within any such understanding the prioritization of the workload according to business-defined rules will then provide the IT department with a model that can be used to validate any proposed changes.

Virtualization is no different to any other IT change, in that unless an organization has a starting reference point, an understanding of what it is delivering, and a business service objective – in terms of what level of service and priority the workload can be categorized as – then measuring success becomes impossible.

Butler Group considers that management of virtualization is based on four key principles:

Firstly, it is the avoidance of risks: this is particularly relevant as the ever-expanding footprint of virtualization introduces more and more technology. Unfortunately, as the market is still new and maturing this technology is not completely interoperable, which represents the biggest risk to organizations. The management layer provides a structure that, when applied on top of the technology, can mitigate the risks of incompatible technologies and hardware. Another risk that management helps mitigate is that of security. New technologies bring with them new threats, which require new approaches and techniques for dealing with any potential vulnerability.

Secondly, it can ensure that service quality is maintained: one of the big benefits virtualization promises is an improved level of service; however, delivering this improved level requires some form of management to understand the business demand and allocate the resources accordingly. Interoperability with a service management toolset, and using recognized frameworks such as ITIL®, are significant aspects of ensuring that service levels are maintained and delivered.

Thirdly, it is the maximization of people and technology: virtualization has a proven Return on Investment (ROI) in terms of increasing the utilization of equipment, but in order to deliver the optimum efficiency of the equipment and the use of this equipment by an organization, a holistic perspective is needed based on business policies and rules as well as what technical resources are available. Using virtualization to improve the effectiveness of employees is a more difficult challenge, as the introduction of a shared resource principle requires a cultural change, but a management tool is important so that any chargeback or allocation of costs is transparent and accurate.

Fourthly, it provides a platform for flexibility: the ability to move live-running VMs between different physical servers so that maintenance or performance issues can be resolved requires a level of control, automation, and management to fully exploit these capabilities, primarily because of the issues with compatibility and where workload can be placed. Another more recent task of the management layer is to optimize the energy use of computer equipment when linked to business demand and resource availability.

MOVING BEYOND SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

Server virtualization is the current area of focus, and has been since 2005, but with adoption rates only now predicted to increase beyond the 15% penetration level in production use it is not surprising that other forms of virtualization have been viewed as ‘too new’ to consider implementation. In fact server virtualization is now seen as an enabling technology, where some rudimentary standards, the OVF v1.0, have been agreed between the major vendors, but the other areas of virtualization are still characterized by proprietary technologies and are increasingly being challenged to focus on interoperability between server virtualization technologies and other newer forms. Butler Group considers that as the ecosystem surrounding virtualization matures then end-user pressure will force the adoption of standards enabling interoperability.



However, client-side virtualization in 2008 was characterized as being a new discipline, with the value proposition obscured by the complexities and sheer number of different approaches being proposed by the vendors. 2009 will see a convergence of thinking, if not actual approaches, and we expect many organizations to consider executing small-scale pilot projects to understand the benefits and implications of moving away from traditional desktop PCs as their primary user business tool.

We believe that the management of assets and security aspects – in particular the desire to restrict users’ access to sensitive data, as well as the ability to stop this data being transferred to portable devices such as Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives – represent the areas of most interest in client-side virtualization in 2009. Butler Group advocates caution here, as this market is still very new and the technologies are maturing rapidly, which makes selection of strategic solutions a difficult task. This is especially true as the management vendors must wait and see which approach becomes the most likely to be widely adopted. Only then can they (the systems management vendors) incorporate client-side management as part of a comprehensive data center management capability. We do not see these tools being used for traditional ‘fat-client’ device management, but rather for centralized client-side virtualization or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as it has become commonly known.

Currently, the leading edge of virtualization is moving in two separate directions: from an end-user and consumer perspective, the growth of virtual worlds and the use of avatars is seen as a natural progression of the social networking and online shopping capabilities currently in wide use; from an Independent Software Vendor (ISV)’s perspective, the move into virtualizing the mobile telephone is more about making the delivery of services to end users easier and cheaper for them. As virtualization expands into these new diverse markets, the capability of systems management tools will need to change. In Butler Group’s opinion many organizations will move to adopt the ‘everything is a service’ paradigm, which will mean that the IT department must make its services compatible with the way in which end users want to consume them; this will almost certainly necessitate having multiple technologies that address specific business requirements, but must be managed in a coordinated and integrated approach.

Virtualization is an enabling technology, and currently only a few leading management vendors have solutions that can comprehensively provide the management capabilities needed to ensure that server virtualization is providing real value to an organization. Therefore, management of these newer forms of virtualization will further distinguish the leading systems management vendors. Butler Group believes that only the leading vendors will have the vision to ensure that their products keep up with the adoption of the plethora of virtualization approaches that will begin to mature over the coming years.

Client Side

There are several systems management tools on the market that are capable of pushing software out to remote servers and desktops, but problems often arise when the application is installed to the local operating system. The likelihood of a problem arising due to a software clash increases as more programs, patches, fixes, and updates are pushed out to the device; eventually something breaks and it is the IT department’s job to fix it – fast!

Early desktop virtualization solutions were based on the premise that by moving the end users’ desktops to a central location, normally the data center, the costs of managing and maintaining these devices would be dramatically reduced. However, a number of issues quickly became apparent with this simple approach:

Firstly, management of the applications and images was not addressed. Recent developments have now changed the emphasis so that client-side virtualization is about managing the operating system, applications, and personal configuration setting. Therefore, any systems management tool must be able to work with the concept of cloning – where an operating system image is created from a master copy, but using pointers so that the clone has a much smaller footprint – as well as delivering applications to users from a single source and matching these up with the end user’s personal configuration setting.

Secondly, by moving the desktops to the data center, organizations were finding that all the benefits obtained from server consolidation, such as reduced power and cooling, and reduced floor space requirements were being eroded, as the data center was being filled up with centrally hosted desktops and all the associated storage requirements. This was termed data center crowding, and has led to a new approach of distributed hubs being developed: a branch-centric, centrally hosted solution that also reduced the issue of network latency.



Thirdly, the growing number of homeworkers was not addressed by this approach, and current developments have spawned a new Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) model – where individuals are given an allowance to purchase a home PC that is also their work PC, and through using standard images, VPNs, and virtual environments the end user can work in a secure corporate partition, and any personal use of the computer does not compromise this corporate partition.

Finally, the problem of dealing with mobile workers that are not connected to the corporate network was not addressed by this simple centralized approach. Currently, local caches and techniques such as bit-level synchronization are used to provide the mobile workers with a compromise solution.

All of these developments confirm the view that obtaining value from any client-side virtualization project needs a management tool that has visibility across all these aspects. We believe this will be the next evolution in systems management tools as these capabilities will be needed when the pilot projects turn to production deployments in approximately 18-24 months’ time.

In response to this challenge, a new kind of application virtualization solution has been developed: these application virtualization solutions package up off-the-shelf and bespoke Windows applications into a binary format that can be pushed or streamed to a user’s laptop or desktop computer on demand, where it then executes.

It is important to understand that applications deployed in this way are not in fact ‘installed’ on the computer in the traditional sense: they are instead wrapped in their own execution shell, and so kept separate from other applications. These application virtualization solutions are invaluable to organizations with large numbers of users running large numbers of legacy Windows applications. However, once again, managing the use and deployment of these must be a coordinated activity.

Cloud Computing

The move to Infrastructure Cloud Computing (ICC) will initially be a service-led offering, but many large organizations are looking for a product to make their internal computing into an internal cloud. Butler Group believes that the management aspects of ICC represent the next big challenge for the systems management vendors: the levels of interoperability between different cloud solutions, different application middleware, and operating systems will be amplified by the introduction of Web-based access methods and the concept of top-up resources that can augment an organization’s internal computing capability.

Initially, we see the service providers as requiring a management tool to ensure security and access are provided to allay any fears organizations may have about using ICC, as well as to ensure that the resources and technology they are using to deliver ICC services to customers are being used as efficiently as possible so that their operating profit margins are maximized in this highly competitive market. However, the same objectives will not be shared by enterprise customers wishing to operate internal ICC. In this situation we believe that organizations will want any such management tool to extend control beyond the data center and include client-side devices and network management across the Internet.

Butler Group believes that ICC represents the bottom layer of a Cloud Computing ecosystem, and the development and deployment of Cloud Computing services based on top of an ICC model represent the next challenge for management vendors to address. We do not consider that these services will be mature enough for mass adoption for at least three years, but we expect the leading management vendors to be developing solutions that will be incorporated into their toolsets in advance of the expected market adoption.

CA VENDOR PROFILE

CA Inc. (NYSE:CA), positions itself as one of the world’s largest management software providers. CA software and expertise unify and simplify complex IT environments – in a secure way – across the enterprise for enhanced business results. CA calls this Enterprise IT Management (EITM™) – a clear vision for the future of IT; this is how an enterprise can manage its systems, networks, security, storage, applications, and databases securely and dynamically. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., has 14,500 employees, operates in more than 150 offices in 45 countries, and has achieved ISO 9001:2000 certification.


Revenues and operating income for the last three fiscal years were as follows:

Year ending 31 March 2008 2007 2006

Revenue (US$ Million): 4,277 3,943 3,772

Change on Previous Year (%): 8 5 5

Total Net Income/(Loss) (US$ Million): 500 121 160

CA has a stated policy to enhance and protect its clients’ IT investments by integrating a wide range of systems in heterogeneous environments. To maintain this stance it has a wide range of partnerships with technology vendors, systems integrators, and IT consultancies.

CA currently serves 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies across every major industry worldwide.

Contact Details

CA Inc. World Headquarters One Computer Associates Plaza Islandia New York 11749 USA

Tel: +1 (800) 225 5224 Fax: +1 (631) 342 6800

www.ca.com


Headquarters: Australian Sales Office: End-user Sales Office (USA):

Shirethorn House, Butler Direct Pty Ltd., Butler Group, 37/43 Prospect Street, Level 46, Citigroup Building, 245 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, Kingston upon Hull, 2 Park Street, Sydney, New York, NY 10016, HU2 8PX, UK NSW, 2000, Australia USA

Tel: +44 (0)1482 586149 Tel: + 61 (02) 8705 6960 Tel: +1 212 652 5302 Fax: +44 (0)1482 323577 Fax: + 61 (02) 8705 6961 Fax: +1 212 202 4684

For more information on Butler Group’s Subscription Services please contact one of the local offices above.

Important Notice This report contains data and information up-to-date and correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of preparation. The data and information comes from a variety of sources outside our direct control, therefore Butler Direct Limited cannot give any guarantees relating to the content of this report. Ultimate responsibility for all interpretations of, and use of, data, information and commentary in this report remains with you. Butler Direct Limited will not be liable for any interpretations or decisions made by you.

CA Automating Virtualization Management

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