According to a new survey, 77 percent say they're concerned about the effect of the cloud’s self-provisioning model on existing virtualized application performance.

Xangati and ZK Research, an IT consulting and research firm, released the findings from this joint survey covering the state of existing enterprise virtualization and cloud deployments, future plans, and the biggest challenges facing organizations in the implementation of these infrastructures.

The survey highlights several key obstacles and concerns in managing cloud performance. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed indicate that increasing density has made performance management of the cloud more difficult, yet – adding to the problem – 60 percent state that their existing solutions are unable to provide live insights in identifying and remediating performance problems and only deliver “after-the-fact” analysis. Further compounding the problem, an even larger 74 percent say that vSphere/vCenter does not deliver the automated performance remediation they expected.

“These survey findings are loud and clear,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research. “A next generation data center needs next generation management tools. IT requires live insight into performance problems to confidently deliver and expand cloud-based data centers.”

Other specific findings include:

- More than 50 percent of respondents indicate that performance storms in their organizations can take over two hours to identify and last more than a day

- One in four of those surveyed state that they have been forced to roll back an application from virtual to physical due to undiagnosed performance storms.

Responding to what’s needed and organizations’ plans for the future, the survey also showed that cloud infrastructures should not be managed as separate “islands,” with an overwhelming 94 percent of respondents saying that the cloud needs to be managed as a cross-silo endeavor among server, network and storage teams.

Contributing to overall concerns about managing performance storms were respondents’ perceptions about the unique characteristics of cloud storms as:

- The most difficult problems to track down and resolve (28 percent)

- Transient in nature (20 percent)

- Fly “under the radar” of existing monitoring solutions (19 percent)

- Resulting from “the moving parts in a virtual environment” (12 percent)

Of those surveyed, nearly 75 percent indicate they would budget IT resources toward a solution to resolve cloud performance storms.

The survey also shows that as organizations move to the cloud, hybrid models are being increasingly adopted. Specifically, of the organizations surveyed, 40 percent are either evaluating Microsoft Hyper-V or already have it in production and/or test environments.

The survey also revealed the following top three internal drivers for organizations’ hybrid plans:

- A growing positive perception about Hyper-V being ‘good enough’ (27 percent)

- VMware licensing/pricing (34 percent)

- A diversity model approach – using different hypervisors for different applications (17 percent).

The findings were based on more than 300 online surveys, jointly deployed by Xangati and ZK Research and completed by virtualization and IT admins and managers in July 2012. Respondents were from organizations of varying sizes, with more than 50 percent in companies with one thousand employees or more. Additionally, 75 percent of those surveyed were in organizations with more than 50 percent server virtualization – representing a 10 percent increase in server virtualization from Xangati’s 2010 server virtualization survey.