How might a company utilize a virtualization resource summary?

Companies may use a virtualization resource summary or some similar tool to look at how a virtualization system is working. A virtualization resource summary can deliver a lot of actionable information, especially if it’s driven by an automated or machine learning system that can aggregate data and provide transparent results for decision makers.

One way that companies might use a virtualization resource summary is to assess the components of a system and get a clear, up-to-date picture of what is built into a virtualized network. For example, a virtualization resource summary might show numbers of active hosts, numbers of virtual machines, numbers of CPU cores, and amounts of CPU and RAM in the system. In terms of clustering, a virtualization resource summary might also show numbers and sizes of clusters, and resource pools or non-clustered VMs.

Another major use of a virtualization resource summary is to assess cost. A virtualization resource summary might show, for instance, a tally of one-time on-premises costs, against a total of monthly cloud costs. This helps the business to make those big decisions about whether it is more cost-effective to house all or part of a system in-house, or to outsource it to a vendor’s cloud platform. A summary might also break down costs into individual components, such as storage. A virtualization resource summary might total up multiple cloud services like those from big companies such as Amazon Web Services (EC2, etc.) to come up with accurate cost comparisons. The summary might also show “total costs of ownership” for one or more types of setups, to help leaders make apples-to-apples comparisons, or drill down into the details of cost per average virtual machine.

In general, companies will often use a resource summary to observe what’s going on within a virtualization architecture. Some of these systems will offer an “age of summary” feature to let stakeholders know how regularly assessments are updated. A virtualization resource summary can help quite a lot with issues such as undersized/oversized VMs, decommissioning of VMs or applications, or all sorts of other key issues that businesses need to follow in order to optimize their virtualized systems.