Future Capacity Planning and Monitoring Storage Utilization: Top Issues for Managing Virtual Server Environments

According to a new virtual server usage survey by Xiotech Corporation, the two most difficult issues in managing storage for virtual servers are planning future capacity and monitoring storage utilization. Those concerns ranked ahead of allocating storage, backing up or replicating storage and migrating datastores from one tier of disk to another.

Xiotech’s survey polled 185 virtual server administrators who attended VMworld 2007 on how they build and manage their virtual infrastructures, including the question that had them rank the most difficult issues in managing software and storage. Future capacity planning was chosen as the most difficult issue by 59 respondents, or nearly 32 percent of the survey pool, and 52 administrators — 28 percent — chose monitoring storage utilization as their top issue. Allocating storage received 38 votes, or 20 percent, and backing up or replicating virtual server storage received 31 votes, or 17 percent. Only five respondents, or 3 percent, chose migrating datastores as the most difficult issue.

"While organizations are seeing increased efficiency with virtualized server environments, they also are experiencing increased complexity and headaches in managing their storage," said Eric Lomascolo, Director of Product Management at Xiotech. "Our survey shows this move to virtualized servers is complicating some critical storage processes, so it’s important for organizations to research ways of automating and simplifying storage management before problems get worse."

To help virtual server users address these challenges, Xiotech offers the Virtual View plug-in for its ICON Manager user interface, which provides advanced integration and automation for storage provisioning and reporting in virtual server environments.

Virtual View, designed for users of Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 and Magnitude 3D 4000 storage systems, provides a global view of the three storage layers (array, physical server and virtual machine) from a single console and then automates configuration and provisioning across all three layers. As a result, storage allocation and utilization are much easier to track between layers. Also, provisioning tasks are reduced from dozens of steps to as few as three, resulting in faster and easier management with less risk of misconfigurations.

"The results from the Xiotech survey are in line with our own research and expectations," said Mark Peters, an Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "As users load more virtual machines, run more applications and serve more users on each physical server, monitoring storage usage levels and planning capacity are crucial. Our research shows that many users experience additional storage demands in virtualized environments, driven by latent demand and ease of provisioning. An effective management tool such as Xiotech’s Virtual View — which happens to work via an intuitive and elegant GUI — is a good step to avoid surprises and to ensure accurate, timely control."