IT professionals need to upgrade to keep up with virtualisation demands

As IT professionals grapple with the increasing demands of virtualisation workloads, almost half of them are planning to upgrade their server memory in the next 12 months, according to a survey by memory and storage firm Crucial.

The study of 350 IT decision makers to learn about virtualisation habits found that, on average, IT professionals are running 29 virtual machines per physical server. If a need arose to run more virtual machines per host, two-thirds (66%) of IT Pros say they would need to add more memory compared to 42% who say they would need to add extra servers.

The majority of IT professionals allocate at least 64GB of memory to the hungriest apps to ensure virtualised applications run optimally, whilst 44% are running in excess of 128GB for virtualised big data and analytics, the study found.

According to the survey, almost half (48%) of IT decision makers said unexpected issues like unpredictable workload demands or rapid user base growth is one of the biggest challenges they face when dealing with server workload constraints.

"As virtualised workloads grow it will only become more difficult for IT professionals to keep up with the demands placed on server infrastructure," says Michael Moreland, Crucial worldwide product manager.

"Our study found that 58% of IT professionals are running less than 60% of their physical servers at their maximum memory limit," he says. "Whilst 46% of those IT pros said the memory installed was sufficient, others cited that a limited budget, limited time to upgrade and limited skills to upgrade was preventing them from maxing out further servers, potentially hampering their efforts to keep up with demand.

"But as time goes on, the server workloads of tomorrow will outstrip the workloads of today and we'd expect to see more IT professionals maxing out their memory limit to keep up with demand," Moreland says.

He continues, "It's possible for IT professionals to get the most out of their IT budget by identifying high-growth, business-critical applications and then installing future-proofed 32GB modules to deliver optimal quality of server and scalability at a typically lower price than that of multiple lower-density modules.

"By installing enough memory, IT professionals can deliver optimal quality of service today and for the foreseeable future," says Moreland.

"Server memory is a long-term investment that's never just about the here and now, it's about predicting future workloads.