The four stages of virtualisation maturity

Why are most organisations not achieving more with infrastructure virtualisation? They just aren’t ready to. Through more than 200 enterprise interviews, correlated with survey data, Forrester has identified four clear stages of infrastructure virtualisation maturity that dictate readiness for various management and automation technologies, process improvements that must be made and standardisations that have to be realised to achieve greater gains. These improvements cannot be fast tracked – enterprises must go through each stage as they gain experience.

Stage 1: All organisations start with a period of acclimatisation
Most companies start down the path of server virtualisation by learning about the technology and how it works, testing it against simple applications and determining where it can be safely applied. During the acclimatisation phase, IT typically virtualises applications that are considered easy targets, because they have low business impact, few users and minimal performance requirements.

Stage 2: Experimentation moves to a strategy of consolidation
In stage two, organisations grow more comfortable with the concept, maturity and stability of their chosen server virtualisation technology and begin to shift to a more strategic implementation. This stage is most easily identified when an organisation shifts its default deployment mindset from server to virtual server, also known as a “virtual first” policy.

Stage 3: Virtualisation empowers process improvement
In stage two, the business starts leveraging the unique benefits of the virtualisation infrastructure features, such as live migration, backup services, resource scheduling, and virtual machine (VM) templates. In stage three, the growing use of these technologies leads to improvements in key processes such as change management, incident management and deployment.

Stage 4: Processes turn into policies and automation takes over
As processes mature and evolve to take advantage of virtualisation technologies, organisations discover that the key to managing VM sprawl is policy-based automation that reduces the manual labour in the virtualised pool, driving up client self-service. As virtualisation proliferates and automation moves to higher-level tasks, the organisation begins to manage its virtual environment as a pool, which prepares it to treat this pool as an internal cloud service.

Each enterprise needs to prepare for the implications of widespread use of infrastructure virtualisation; the changes it demands and the ease with which it can be used will vary based on the organisation’s comfort with sharing, structure, process orientation and standardisation.

To keep the experiences positive and maturity moving forward, Forrester recommends that organisations:

• Start with non-critical workloads for safe learning. As you experiment with new tools, processes and automations, try them out first on workloads that are not critical to the business. Development test labs are the safest places to try these new technologies. If you are in stage two and want to fast track to stage three, start with a lab management tool such as Surgient or VMware Lab Manager.

• Beef up new server configurations. When refreshing servers, be aware that the most common bottlenecks with server virtualisation are memory and I/O bandwidth – not CPU. Increasing the number and capacity of Dimms used and the amount of NICs in the servers will let you pack more VMs per physical box.

• Invest in infrastructure and operations virtualisation solutions. Although you are probably more likely to migrate VMs for maintenance purposes than for pool optimisation, it helps if your infrastructure is migration-aware and will move the World Wide Name, MAC address, VLAN and zone assignments and other settings of the VMs when you need to migrate them.

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