CIO — Virtualization is understood as one of the key building blocks for private clouds. As a dynamic technology that enables IT organizations to reinvent how they think about management, it has the potential to make some things easier or make all things harder. Silo buying, heterogeneity, politics, poor integrations, and immature management tools can inhibit virtualization's full value.

IT leadership must address these challenges in order to set the stage for private cloud deployments, which many pundits forecast as the foundation for business growth in the next decade. Based on many customer conversations, we have compiled the top eight requirements for successful deployments of private clouds. These considerations enable IT to deliver business growth and contain costs, getting more from people, processes, and technologies.

1. Virtual Plus Physical Scalable Management

The integration of physical and virtual management is a key requirement to successfully deploying private clouds. Almost every IT organization is utilizing virtualization increasingly and starting to consider heterogeneous hypervisors. There is a growing need to have both "element" management and end-to-end "value" management that drive the need to use existing root-cause analytics, models-based management, integrated interfaces, and run book automation for both physical and virtual environments. Virtualization does not obviate the need for management; it makes it more critical, especially as cloud computing is based on real time compute pools and dynamic allocation models.

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2. Next Generation Architectures

Next generation data center architectures, such as Cisco Nexus virtual switches and the Cisco Unified Computing System will play a key role in enabling private clouds as they compress network, storage, and server connectivity into a single chassis. These architectures use virtualization and offer customers new management paradigms for configuration, automation, security, and application-aware problem resolution. Management of these systems must enable customers to get more from the virtual layer, delivering dynamic capacity management and business service visibility.

3. Policy-Based Management

Management solutions must understand and aggregate polices from across different components; this is a notable requirement as private clouds dynamically shift and manage resources based on business demands. Pseudo standards such as OVF will be deployed over the next few years as the need to manage VMs from a service perspective (versus current component) enable service-oriented management. Policies will come in many different flavors, such as business or technology, and aggregation points will become critical to maintaining service levels in dynamic cloud environments. The integration of contractual agreements, chargeback, performance, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics will be paramount in measuring value and delivering high quality IT capabilities that support and drive the business.

4. Process Standardization

ITIL version 2 and 3, CoBit, and other capability maturity models will continue to garner attention as VM sprawl, compliance, availability, and security concerns increase the need for management and control. The fastest way to reduce costs is to standardize. Processes—both human and technology—offer opportunities to contain costs, not just reduce them across physical and virtual infrastructures. The integration of these environments becomes paramount.

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