Application Performance Management in Virtualized Server Environments

As businesses have grown, so has the need to deploy I/T applications rapidly to support the expanding business processes. Often, this growth was achieved in an unplanned way: each time a new application was needed a new server along with the application software was deployed and new storage elements were purchased. In many cases this has led to what is often referred to as "Server sprawl", resulting in low server utilization and high system management costs. An architectural approach that is becoming increasingly popular to address this problem is known as server virtualization. In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of server consolidation using virtualization and point out associated issues that arise in the area of application performance.