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Top challenges virtualization pose, without management strategy

Posted on July, Saturday 30, 2011 By itVAR News Network

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Many, if not most, of the security issues faced by IT around physical and virtual environments are the same. In addition, the majority of attacks today are people-based.

These attacks will be successful no matter if someone is running in a VM or natively on the machine. For example, endpoint protection is just as important in the VM shell as outside it. There are many challenges which are amplified if virtualization technology is deployed without an effective management strategy in mind. There would be issues faced in Application and data availability, managing virtual and physical server sprawl, optimizing resource utilization, Desktop/Application management and Security.

“While virtualization eases deployment and enables workload mobility, it can make security, configuration management and compliance more challenging than in physical environments. According to the India findings of the 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, among enterprises that have implemented server virtualization, security was the number one concern. Fifty-five percent said it was a somewhat/extremely large factor in keeping various constituents from being more confident about placing mission-critical applications on virtualized servers,” says Anand Naik of Symantec.

Today, the biggest concerns in the virtual environment include:

1. Managing oversight and responsibility

Unlike physical servers, which are the direct responsibility of the data-center or IT managers in whose physical domain they sit, responsibility for virtual servers is often left up in the air.

2. Patching and maintenance

The most tangible risk that can come out of a lack of responsibility is the failure to keep up with the constant, labor-intensive process of patching, maintaining and securing each virtual server in a company. Unlike the physical servers on which they sit, which are launched and configured by hands-on IT managers who also install the latest patches, virtual machines tend to be launched from server images that may have been created, configured and patched weeks or months before.

3. Visibility and compliance

Virtual servers are designed to be, if not invisible, then at least very low profile, at least within the data center. All the storage or bandwidth or floor space or electricity they need comes from the physical server on which they sit. To data-center managers not specifically tasked with monitoring all the minute interactions of the VMs inside each host, a set of virtual servers becomes an invisible network within which there are few controls.

4. VM sprawl

Another consequence of the lack of oversight of virtual machines is sprawl—the uncontrolled proliferation of virtual machines launched, and often forgotten, by IT managers, developers or business-unit managers who want extra servers for some specific purpose, and lose track of them later.

However, with a better management view and with proper security deployments the challenges can be avoided.

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