Currently, an overwhelming majority of organizations are migrating and consolidating servers from physical to virtual environments. While the savings of the virtualized data center are extremely compelling, there is a new set of challenges that IT staffs didn’t have to deal with in the physical world.

One of the challenges is getting used to the fact that all hardware resources: CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization are shared between virtual machines. This means that applications and users can impact each other and, therefore, resource monitoring becomes extremely important. If you don’t closely monitor resource consumption by each virtual machine and simply keep adding more virtual machines without doing analysis on how this will impact all four core resources, the result will be bad performance and even system downtime. Ultimately, this means unhappy users, dissatisfied managers, and a negative impact on the virtualization project. So, you need to find a way to prevent this problem.