Looking back at the “Top 5 Criteria in Choosing the Right Virtualization Platform” webinar.
As enterprises soldier on toward modernizing their infrastructure, a seamless experience is required for environment management. Organizations must balance security, scalability, availability, and operational excellence when choosing their virtualization platforms and infrastructure management tools.
Modernizing IT Infrastructure: Strategic Imperatives
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, CIOs and IT leaders face increasing pressure to modernize their infrastructure while balancing security, scalability, availability, and operational excellence. Naveen Chhabra, a VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared some thoughts on how enterprises can select the right tools to enable seamless infrastructure management. Although no one-size-fits-all approach exists as industry-specific needs shape priorities across sectors, there are key tenets that enterprises can prioritize as they select solutions for their tech stack.
Key Focus Areas:
- Virtualization & Performance Organizations require enterprise-class capabilities to ensure performance and scalability. Security remains a top priority, but a balance must be struck between availability, operational excellence, and resilience. Naveen highlights sector-specific considerations—stock trading, retail, and pharma demand high performance AND security, whereas other industries emphasize availability for mission-critical operations.
- Hypervisor Selection The hypervisor layer is pivotal in shaping security and recovery strategies. IT leaders must determine whether their chosen hypervisor provides transaction-level data consistency, backup, and recovery, alongside layered protection at the OS and database levels. Achieving granular protection tailored to organizational needs is essential.
- IT Continuity & Security Disaster recovery and security measures often rely on hypervisor-level capabilities. Security at the infrastructure layer is the most significant factor in decision-making, preventing vulnerability exploitation. CIOs must evaluate whether their infrastructure meets all necessary requirements, ensuring IT continuity and resilience.
- Monitoring for Success As businesses innovate beyond traditional hypervisor usage, real-time monitoring becomes indispensable. IT leaders must assess whether their infrastructure and hypervisor layer offer the required capabilities to maintain continuity, security, and operational efficiency.
The Path Forward
Table stakes such as security, performance, and resilience are now cross-industry standards, but the next frontier involves market innovation to meet emerging needs. By selecting the right hypervisor, implementing layered protection, prioritizing disaster recovery, and leveraging real-time monitoring for hybrid environments, organizations can future proof their IT infrastructure. VMware has been evolving their vSphere product for years to address infrastructure operations from three core capability pillars that enable their clients to modernize, support modern workloads, and enable security and compliance. I spent some time highlighting these capabilities behind their vSphere product, namely:
- Modernize compute infrastructure. This means improving operational efficiency for cloud admins, providing scalable infrastructure, and reducing overall TCO and sunk cost.
2. Deliver the best platform for modern workloads. A “modern platform” implies a single platform for running VMs and containers, built-in K8s runtime and distribution, and self-service access to cluster services.
3. Enable security and compliance. This means an intrinsically secure platform with built-in out of the box security configurations, including standards based federated authentication with enterprise identity providers, and improved compliance/industry-specific configurations.
Q&A with Naveen Chhabra and Sandeep Byreddy
We began the Q&A discussion asking the guests how to provide an easier experience for infrastructure admins. Sandeep shared consistent feedback his team has heard from customers with thousands of workloads running across servers globally, and they value scaling to ease the management of these large infrastructures. Lifecycle management is first and foremost. Part of this holistic lifecycle management includes an emphasis on patching without downtime. Via their code management stack to reduce resolution SLAs, workers using vSphere can remain productive while any updates are patched in
There is also a critical need for ease of integrations; vSphere is the best for private cloud because it reduces extraneous labor spent on integration and context switching between applications or views. These decisionmakers are seeking seamless integration that provides a shorter time to value.
Regarding customer perspective on cost management, Naveen had this to say:
Management and operational overhead: Everything is driven by cost. It’s a fine line to walk to be focused on hardware efficiency without impacting performance. The answer is not more VMs, but better performance of existing VMs. That’s why software and applications that enhance these aspects without impacting performance are popular: customers want to see scale and mitigate downtime without adding a swath of resources and FTEs. These customers also seek bundled support: Seamless self-diagnosis to get quick stack support and resolutions without having to go back and forth between different people and resources. This will enable employess to more efficiently meet SLAs. Mitigation of extraneous support resources and reduction of the need for multiple VMs and FTEs helps decision makers manage costs more effectively.
When prompted to explain how the reality may be different for larger enterprise companies, Naveen referenced the trend of centralization of technology management tools and providers. While centralization of heterogeneous environments continues to be the goal, the reality is that organizations (especially larger ones) will always have multiple solutions and applications, from storage platforms to mainframe to hypervisors, management tools and skills will always be necessary for management of the full environment. Containers will also continue to be part of the modernization effort, for private cloud and data centers, alike.
Sandeep closed the discussion addressing some common vSphere myths: What constitutes major costs from their data center? It’s the hardware they purchase, the application cost, and operational resources to manage large-scale infrastructure. Enterprises should not compromise on performance and efficiency. Whether you are running workloads on bare metal or VMs, a centralized management experience is critical.
To watch this webinar, please visit our YouTube channel video:
Top 5 Criteria in Choosing the Right Virtualization Platform – YouTube
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