As with all major IT revolutions before it, virtualization has introduced new and difficult management challenges. Without new approaches to Virtual Systems Management (VSM), enterprises will suffer from increased downtime, higher costs, staff shortages, lack of flexibility, competitive disadvantage, and many other problems.

This EMA Advisory Note provides a starting point for IT organizations to identify and start to overcome these virtualization and VSM challenges, by highlighting key best practice targets – in areas like mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), SLA achievement, Administrator-to-VM ratio, VM deployment time, and power consumption.

It also analyses the outcomes from 18 different VSM disciplines, including Asset Management, Capacity Planning, Provisioning, Change and Configuration Management, Chargeback, Compliance, Performance and Availability Monitoring, Backup and Recovery, Virtual Machine Management, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, Event Management, IT Process Automation (Run Book Automation), and Workload Automation.

It also includes a full-page case study of virtualization and virtual systems management at a large European bank, based on an in-depth focal interview, showing details of how effective VSM delivers results in this real-world environment.

This data and advice, summarized from EMA research, will help enterprises to identify potential problems, and improve how they manage their virtualization deployments, to achieve better results in measurable outcomes like ROI, TCO, staff efficiency, SLA, availability, agility, and more.