People May Be the Weakest Link in the Server Virtualization Chain

Many IT shops lacking in virtualization knowledge and skills

I participated in a webinar on virtualization last week, along with Extreme Networks and Microsoft. During the session, 113 audience members were asked two polling questions. Here are the questions and the results:

1. In your opinion, which of the following factors is holding your organization back from using server virtualization more prominently throughout the enterprise?

1. Lack of virtualization skills/knowledge within IT (42%)
2. Security / regulatory concerns (10%)
3 Organizational complexity – separate groups mange different elements (32%)
4. Software licensing/support from ISVs (10%)

2. As you move forward with virtualization, which of the following IT groups need to become more educated and involved in the project?

1. Security / Compliance group (45%)
2. Server Group (52%)
3. Networking group (72%)
4. Application developers (31%)
5. Storage Group (50%)

ESG Research indicates that server virtualization is one of the highest IT priorities and will generate a lot of IT spending in 2010. Ironically, it seems like that spending must be on hypervisors, virtualization tools, servers, and storage rather than training and IT collaboration.

In my humble opinion, server virtualization technology is at a tipping point. Yes, we've squeezed a lot of value out of it to consolidate Windows server workloads but future "dynamic virtual infrastructure" will require a lot more thought around IT processes and architecture. This means a lot of collective IT thought and preparation by virtualization-savvy IT folks.

If we are going to reach this plateau, the ESG and webinar data indicates that we better pay attention to people and process problems -- not just technology problems. Without this the whole virtualization gravy train could slow down or come to an abrupt stop.

• Extreme Networks
• Microsoft
• virtualization
• VMware