Great piece. We have indeed come a long way in a short period of time and advances are sure to continue at a rapid pace.What I would suggest around all of this is that automation is the key. That is where you begin to realize real process efficiencies. Without it, you’re not likely to meet your financial and operational goals. Automation in a virtualized environment can increase efficiency and lower operating costs by eliminating labor intensive tasks. Centralized virtual sever managers are a must to reduce the time spent provisioning and managing VMs across a variety of platforms.
There are also tools for migrating Physical to Virtual (P2V) and Virtual to Virtual (V2V) VMs. These tools are indispensible with key features that provide the ability to move VMs to other servers “live” without powering them down or experiencing any down time.
Some important areas to consider:
• Asset and licensing management
• Automated network-based discovery and mapping
• Centralized provisioning of physical and virtual servers
• Creation and management of templates, images and clones
• Lifecycle management of VMs that may take minutes to provision and years to
kill without the right tools and automation
• Configuration auditing, verification and alerts
• Tracking configuration baselines against changes intended—control drift from secure and optimized VM configurations and gold builds
• Security based on policies and rule based management for VMs – don’t allow
VMs on the host without the right level of approval and security
• Release and patch management
• Physical and virtual server performance monitoring for Service Level metrics and
reporting
• “Self-Service” VM provisioning through a reservation system with role, rule, and
membership driven access
• Orchestrated and dynamic resource allocation to automate the balancing of
physical and virtual server resources
• Backup automation with scheduling and media management capabilities (image
and file level backups)

Although this is a list of critical areas for automation, there will be other areas for you to consider as virtualization technologies mature.

Glen Seimetz, Senior Director
Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc