Hello,

Using Virtualization does not reduce the amount of man power you need to manage the 1000 virtual servers or so. Yes, you no longer need many physical boxes, so your hardware support costs go down. You may not need as many people to pull cable, etc. But the day to day management of the Virtual Servers does not change. This has been the problem from the beginning of virtualization. It does NOT reduce the # of administrators you need. It reduces the number of physical resources you need to run the virtual machines and reduces costs. Not IT people.

Best regards,
Edward

After reading your article I wanted to add to the issues noted involving ‘blowback.’ A CIO survey found that IT managers are having a hard time finding resources with significant skills in server virtualization. This has caused Internal IT staffs that have little knowledge of the technology to want to learn it and will shun or push back on bringing in outside consultants that could help to reduce the risk of blowback scenarios.

In addition, existing application owners/business managers are often not motivated (financially or otherwise) to reduce their physical server count. You have to change this to get their buy-in and speed adoption of the technology internally. Often server virtualization projects can be successful but require a proper plan and design.

I have attached below a link to a presentation I conducted at VMworld on this topic / avoiding hidden costs and risks for those who would like to explore these issues even further.

-Ron Oglesby, director of architecture for virtualization services at GlassHouse

http://www.glasshouse.com/slides/Great_Expectations_Ron_Oglesby.ppt

So far I have seen that only the potential cost saving part of server virtualization is presented to senior executives to get their (almost certain) buy off but there is the tendency to score brownie points by only presenting the upside - cost (which no doubt is a big factor), but what about setting performance expectations and associated business risk for HPC environments...

I completely agree with Ron's comment - expect a shortage in VCP-level IT talent.

The VCP is the vmWare Certified Professional skillset and the is a limited number of VCP trainers (rumored to be under 100) for the entire planet.

Alot of the VCP's are working for partner/VARs and they come into an organization peform the capacity assessment, migrate the pilot group of servers (P2V = physical to virtual) and then leave.

The inhouse staff is then left with a vmWare environment they may or may not be comfortable supporting - these systems are much more complex that when the servers were standalone.

You have alot more issues to manage, alot more shared resources, etc and the management tools that are out there are immature at best.

Get help, get automation and analytic tools ASAP to help you manage these environments.

Thanks,

Rob Bergin
Systems Engineer
www.vkernel.com

Just a note to others. The link Ron Oglesby posted to his presentation was truncated (sorry, Ron). The full URL is

http://www.glasshouse.com/slides/

Great_Expectations_Ron_Oglesby.ppt

delete the gap between slides/ and Great_Expectations