CTO Strategies for Virtualization in Government IT (Opinion)

Virtualization is everywhere. It's the hot ticket in town. Sales pitches offer virtual solutions as the new pixie dust that makes technology infrastructure better, cheaper, easier, greener and faster. What can get confusing is that most virtualization products highlight the letter "X" or "V." One of them is VMware. Got that?

Seriously new virtualization products are being installed across America. Many organizations are trying to define terms or build a comprehensive virtualization strategy. In the simplest form, virtualization is the partitioning of physical hardware into a logical view to better use available resources. For instance, server virtualization is the masking of server resources -- including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors and operating systems -- from server users.

Although virtualization technology has been around on mainframes for decades, there's no doubt that new products offer substantial benefits to the enterprise. Virtualization is also an important step toward private cloud computing. So here's a primer of opportunities, challenges and recommendations as you progress down that virtual yellow brick road.

Opportunities

Many governments are consolidating data center servers to save money, and server consolidation efforts should consider virtualization based on hardware cost, space utilization and energy consumption. For example, the average enterprise server is about 10 percent utilized. If virtualization can enable a 10-to-1 consolidation of servers into a virtualized environment, the savings can add up. Some predict that virtual machine technology will soon offer a 60-1 ratio of virtual machines to a host.

Other benefits include: virtual server builds that can be replicated in hours instead of weeks, improved control of system environments for operating system upgrades and configuration changes, ease of administration, improved application performance, easier implementation of disaster recovery and system backups, and overall improvement in availability and reliability of well designed systems environments.