With virtualization, you can reduce the actual costs and boost productivity, resulting in savings in terms of number of servers, carbon footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements. If you are  trying to protect the environment, improve the reputation of the brand or enhance competitiveness, virtualization is a very interesting proposal.

Virtualization allows organizations to leverage the resources of the system by consolidating applications on fewer physical servers. As the demand for infrastructure in the data center changes, in response to peaks in traffic, the physical resources that are not immediately required are switched off automatically, ensuring more efficient use of resources.

To make a successful virtualization implementation, CIOs need to know how to get what they want and determine if the technology is good for business. Within any organization, disruptive or revolutionary initiatives have the highest probability of failure. Instead of approaching virtualization as a gradual evolution, companies can increase their success rate.

Migrate To A Virtual Environment

Virtualization is becoming a commodity, and should be considered as such. With the maturing of the market, CIOs are better prepared and better understand the potential and limitations of technology and what they can expect from a service provider. And it is responsibility of the supplier to provide details concerning best practices, and companies should not refrain from asking all necessary questions.

Determining what percentage of the load of a company can realistically be virtualized is a first thing to understand. We rarely see companies that migrate immediately most of the workload in a virtual environment, it is common practice to start with the less critical activities, experience with the platform and then increase the loads and also include mission-critical applications.

And workloads should migrate further once you have confidence in the platform and the support offered by the cloud computing service provider.

Rather than considering virtualization as a standalone project, companies should look more closely at the internal processes that may be impacted by the adoption of virtualization technologies. Otherwise, the risk is that, customers consider that the expected benefits of virtualization, especially in terms of improved IT agility, do not become reality. In other words, often the main obstacle to the successful adoption of virtualization is not the technology, but the processes that surround it.

This includes provisioning and changing the management processes. Each application involved may compete for processing resources and it is important for companies to adopt software that provides greater visibility in the architecture to determine how IT applications are operating. Increased visibility enables administrators to anticipate conflicts and monitor performance to ensure that critical applications receive the priority they deserve and that performance levels are met.