Problem Statement:
Despite the benefits associated with virtualization and virtualized environments, organizations and business units are faced with challenges that must be overcome in order to fully exploit the capabilities of their virtualized environments.
Within any virtualized environment there are a limited amount of resources (CPU, Memory, Disk, etc.) available for allocation across business units. Delivery of requested virtual environments to support business unit requests can be negatively impacted if virtual environment resources are fully allocated. To ensure an adequate amount of resources are available there has to be proper Server/Desktop virtualization and capacity planning/management in place. Applications hosted in virtualized environments often have large data and storage requirements. In order to support these requirements organizations utilize Storage Area Network (SAN) devices. The SAN environment must also have a defined strategy for Capacity Management to avoid running out of storage needed to create Virtual Machines (VMs) in the environment.
Since virtualized environments contain multiple server instances on the same physical piece of hardware, a different approach to environment security and vulnerability detection has to be taken. With multiple applications being hosted on the same hardware there is a risk that resources with access to one application environment could, in theory, access other applications and their associated resources since they reside on the same hardware platform. The security of virtualized environments, the approach to vulnerability detection, and associated security measures must be addressed in order to avoid unauthorized access to applications and related systems associated with the virtualized environment.
While virtualized environments have made it easier to perform failover activities in the event of a disaster, the ability to perform a Disaster Recovery Test has been made more complex. A major…