Application Virtualization Survey Reveals Hesitation

Taking a break from the rush of activity at VMWorld, today we released the results of our first Application Virtualization Outlook survey.  With virtualization a top priority for many CIOs in the next year, we wanted to hear from IT professionals about their plans to virtualize mission-critical apps. Most importantly, we wanted to learn how quickly they’re making the transition, or whether there are obstacles getting in their way.

We found the survey results pretty interesting – overall, it seems like many application owners recognize the potential benefits of virtualization, but lack the confidence that their Tier-1 apps will continue to perform as needed when moved to a virtual environment. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these results and how we came to this conclusion:

More than 80 percent of professionals polled had virtualized their non-critical systems, but on the flip side, only 14 percent had virtualized more than three quarters or more of their Tier 1 apps (see charts below).  That’s a big divide in the pace of adoption.

The number one obstacle to virtualizing apps? “People Issues,” i.e., application owners who impede the virtualization process.  Respondents also cited worries about performance degradation and application design.

And one of our favorite questions- almost one-third of respondents reported that there are people in their organization who would say, “My Tier 1 application will be virtualized over my dead body!!”  This definitely proves that application virtualization is can elicit an emotional response in concerned application owners.

But, let’s not get discouraged. Just about everyone surveyed agreed that there are some great benefits to be had with virtualization. In particular, respondents noted that server consolidation, power and cost savings were likely payoffs, along with disaster recovery and agility improvements.

So how can virtualization teams assuage the concerns of their colleagues and reap these benefits? By providing hard evidence that the owners’ application will perform well in a virtual environment.

Application owners are responsible for meeting SLAs and for maintaining 100% up-time – and they’re not going to hand over their application without proof that those business objectives won’t be compromised.

The best way to get these facts is to conduct tests to establish a baseline performance in a non-virtual environment, and then provide a comparison of application performance, pre-and post-virtualization.  This “apples-to-apples” strategy presents app owners with evidence that their application will continue to perform to their high standards in a virtual environment.

For more information about how we help companies manage application performance in virtual environments, check this out.

APM Thought Leadership, application monitoring, cloud computing, virtualization