Things to consider when managing a Virtualized Environment

When talking about support issues in a virtualized environment, there are two possible meanings. Firstly we have technical support, which is basically the personnel who support virtualization technology and deal with this technology in a business environment. Secondly we have software related support issues. This refers to the compatibility between different virtualization vendors, operating systems and virtualization software and finally software applications and virtualization software.

Technical Support

When a business implements virtualization, there are many things that can easily be overlooked or forgotten about. Technical support is definitely one of these things. When a business runs software or applications in a normal physical environment, technical support will often automatically be provided as a part of their purchase.

With the advent of virtualization technology, things are not as straightforward. For example, if a certain vendor's application is run in a virtualized environment, even though it was not originally intended to, will that vendor still offer technical support? This is an important question for businesses that they must find an answer to.

Software Support

Software support refers to which software is supported by which platforms; what applications can be run in a particular environment and so on. Firstly, we have support at the hardware level. This level will determine the fundamental virtualization software that a business uses, whether it is a bare metal solution or a hosted solution. If a business has physical machines which use a 64-bit processor, then they will need to deploy virtualization software that offers support for 64-bit processing.

The next level of support is at the host operating system level, assuming of course that a business selected a hosted virtualization solution, rather than a bare metal virtualization solution. If a business operates using a Linux-based infrastructure, then the virtualization software that they deploy should support Linux-based distributions.

The next level is at the guest operating system level. Most businesses will probably want to use the same operating systems that they were previously using on their physical machines. However, in some cases a business may also want to run other virtualized operating system environments. Again, a business should confirm that the virtualization software they are using supports all the guest operating systems that they require.

Finally we have the application level. This refers to which applications can run within a particular virtualized environment. Some of these applications are the same as before. For example you can't run Windows executable files on a Linux-based virtual machine (unless it is using application virtualization software).

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For more information on Virtualization and to sign up for our Cloud Computing Certification courses, have a look at the Virtualization Certification Kit.