Virtualization is transforming the data center and solution providers are migrating their customers to a virtual environment to create a more flexible IT infrastructure, reduce costs and maximize storage resources. At the same time, however, virtualization introduces some new concerns. By understanding the possibilities and challenges associated with virtualization, resellers can maximize their profit by becoming a trusted resource for businesses who want to take advantage of this technology. In turn customers will begin to realize the potential of their virtualized deployments and resellers will be able to add to their bottom line.

What do solution providers need to know before migrating their customers to a virtualization environment?
Before implementing virtualization in a customer environment, partners must look beyond physical servers to consider the impact virtualization will have on the entire IT infrastructure.

At the most fundamental level, customers want their applications to be available regardless of whether the application is running on a physical or a virtual platform. They also want the same level of protection for data that lives on virtual machines and to ensure that their virtual environment can be recovered quickly in the face of disaster. It is also imperative that there is visibility and control into their virtual environment to ensure optimal utilization.

What impact does virtualization have on the IT infrastructure?
Virtualization introduces more complexity into the IT infrastructure since virtual machines, as well as physical ones, must now be managed, including a growing range of virtualization platforms from vendors such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, and others.

For example, let’s take a look just at data protection and storage. Standard backup technologies that have been used successfully in physical environments create significant overhead when applied to a virtual world. Installing a traditional backup client inside a virtual machine is a valid way of protecting it but demands additional system resources needed by other virtual machines hosted on the same physical server. And the disaster recovery advantages that are inherent in the architecture of many virtualization solutions cannot be exploited with this backup methodology as restores at the virtual machine file level are not possible.

Storage management can also be difficult in a virtual environment. While many server virtualization solutions include built-in storage management functionality, these tools can be problematic in a heterogeneous environment. In addition, because virtualization adds a layer of abstraction, is also makes storage more challenging by obfuscating visibility into the IT environment while also increasing the amount of storage to be managed.

How can partners use virtualization to improve a customer’s storage utilization?
With virtualization, solution providers can help improve their customers’ hardware utilization by enabling them to pool all storage into logical groups that can be reallocated quickly or in real time based on demand. The most useful virtualization tools can do this across any storage array from a variety of vendors, running a variety of operating systems, and from a single management interface.

When storage resources are virtualized, they appear as a single resource. Data can be moved transparently across vendors and operating systems to utilize available

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