Government Technology

Many companies today are looking at adopting virtualisation technology in order to reduce overall infrastructure costs and improve server utilisation. However, unless companies carefully plan their migration to the virtual environment, the technology can cause applications to fail, or run slower than usual.

‘Virtualisation brings many benefits, but it is certainly not appropriate for all applications,’ said Hadrian James, technology manager at Compuware. ‘Organisations need to take time to understand whether there will be any impact on application performance before implementing virtualisation. Ultimately, unless IT managers prepare properly, virtualisation could bring applications to a standstill.’

It is well known that high input/output applications such as SQL and Exchange can suffer from drops in performance when they are run on a virtualised server. Although this depends on the number of users and hardware resources allocated to the application, companies do need to baseline performance to ensure that applications on a virtualised server run at the same level of performance as those on a dedicated server.

‘Companies should definitely measure the performance of their current applications before migrating to virtualised servers,’ continued James. ‘It is also important to carry out baseline tests again after moving to virtual servers and to compare this performance to that of a dedicated environment. Otherwise, virtualisation can cause more problems than it solves. Baselining also allows you to prove to grumbling end-users that the IT department hasn’t sacrificed performance in the move to virtual servers.’

‘As well as managing and monitoring performance issues, companies also need to ensure that they correctly set up their virtual servers,’ added James. ‘If a server is misconfigured, it can overload and bring down all of the other applications sitting on it. Whilst virtualisation may have significant benefits for the business and IT department, companies do need to make sure that they set up their servers and profile their applications carefully to make sure they get the level of performance that they’re used to.’

Compuware helps CIOs optimise IT performance to achieve business goals. Our solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organisation. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organisations, including 92 percent of the Fortune 50 companies.