Virtualization is incomplete if you do not do provisioning, because they are complement to each other.

Workload management, virtualization, and provisioning work together and enterprise can be benefitted by considering provisioning and workload management services at the same time when undertaking a virtualization effort. An architect must include provisioning and workload management services when they are architecting virtualization. Most company focused only on server virtualization as their virtualization endeavor. But the enterprises cannot get the maximum value of optimization through only virtualization, that too only server.
Virtualization improves the utilization of IT resources, information, people assets because it allows you to treat resources as abstract entities, accessing and managing those resources across your organization more efficiently, by effect and need rather than physical location. Virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources so they can be accessed as a pool of logical resources. Enterprise Architect needs to provision Server, Storage, Network, and Web Services virtualization when undertaking any virtualization effort. Focusing on a single component can be expensive; implementation can be done in various stages but overall architecture design need to be considered taking a holistic view while designing Enterprise Architecture.
As I mentioned earlier virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources, but if you do not optimize your resources real value of virtualization cannot be realized. Policy-based orchestration is about providing an end-to-end IT service that is dynamically linked to business policies, allowing the ability to adapt to changing business conditions. Having each individual element of an IT system respond to change is a great start, but in the end, to truly be an on demand business requires orchestration of the automation of multiple elements of the systems so that the entire IT infrastructure is responding as it should to changes in business policies or conditions. For example, if a customer’s order entry application suddenly experiences a surge in load, just allocating more CPU may not be enough; it may also need additional storage, more network capacity, and even additional servers and new users to handle the increased activity. All of these changes must be orchestrated so that the dynamic allocation of multiple resource elements occurs seamlessly.

Orchestration enables data centers to move from just-in-case provisioning (providing enough resources to fulfill peaks in IT infrastructure demand, which typically results in low resource utilization) to just-in-time provisioning: automating the infrastructure and executing configuration changes in a repeatable manner, eliminating human execution errors. A typical example of a data center running three applications, in which one application needs additional resources to attend to user demand, while the other two have enough or even extra resources allocated to them. Traditional, manual provisioning practices do not make it practical to move resources from one application to another to meet short-term peaks in demand. Instead, we engage in what we call the just-in-case provisioning cycle: If you look carefully, virtualization and provisioning are complement to each other.

Benefit of virtualization and provisioning flows ultimately to Workload Manager. workload Manager and system provisioning work together. System Provisioning monitors workload across a set of provisioned devices. Enterprise Workload Management (eWLM) is one example of a monitoring technology that provides a basic infrastructure for monitoring and managing a collection of heterogeneous distributed servers.
Workload Management refers to any subsystem that provides functionality to distribute workload across resources within a system or across systems within a network. Within a system, these are usually provided by operating system services, and manage processor, I/O and memory resources according to task priority, resources requested, available resources and other scheduling rules. Higher level OS facilities (e.g. LPARs, Process Resource Managers) may also be available to limit and/or dedicate specific resources to specific tasks or task environments.

A successful EA design should encompasses Workload Management, Provisioning and Virtualization.

Business Resiliency in today's IT World

Business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting and then recovering from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three components – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not directly help the bottom line.
An offensive resilience posture also consists of three components, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these components can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside.
Business resilience encompass business as well as IT Operations and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security. Please contact me for more information.