Take a Virtualization Mulligan

In golf, there is this quaint concept called the Mulligan. Players allow one another one chance during a round of golf to take a tee shot that has gone horribly awry over.

That same concept probably needs to be applied to just about all the instances of virtual machines that were deployed early on during first waves of server consolidation.

Back then, nobody knew a whole lot about virtualization. So chances are those virtual machines are poorly configured, resulting in sub-optimal I/O and memory performance.

Ryan Hulse, product marketing manager for Vision Solutions, says he’s seeing a lot of IT organizations reinstalling virtual machines as part of an overall effort to improve performance. To that end, Vision Solutions recently released an update to its Double-Take suite of data protection software that not only supports VMware vSphere 4.1 but allows IT organizations to automatically provision optimize the disk type needed to enhance the performance of any given virtual server.

We know that conditions for installing anything are not always ideal, especially in the early days of emerging technologies. But all too often we forget, and performance degrades. Naturally, we tend to blame the technology when in fact a little good old-fashioned digital housekeeping is what’s required.

So take a moment and give yourself the virtual equivalent of a Mulligan by revisiting all those virtual machine configurations. You’ll probably be surprised by what you’ll discover. With tools available to optimize the provisioning of the virtual servers, it should take a tenth of the time it took to install them the first time around.