events
Recently, a number of ESG analysts have been speaking at numerous events sponsored by Dell, Intel, Symantec, and VMware. I thought the days had gone by when you mentioned “VMotion” and everyone’s ears perked up, interested to hear what it was and if it really worked. Not the case. Lately, I have been speaking with more customers that understand the basic consolidation benefits of server virtualization, but are not necessarily familiar with some of its other fairly basic functionality. Which is fine and further demonstrates the rich opportunity in the market. The funny thing is that everyone keeps tweeting about “cloud”—aside from IBM, is anyone actual even doing it? Another fact is that mature virtualized environments are those that have typically been able to quickly virtualize 20-30% of their x86 environments. I keep saying that is the easy part—for the most part, it is brain dead simple. Achieving that next 5% is what can be extremely difficult. ITBC (Issues to be Considered):
- Companies are virtualizing without considering optimization.
- Administrators are neglecting the simple things, like the role-based access policies that they apply in the physical world. VM sprawl is primarily caused by too many Indians and an absent chief.
- Server huggers: These are application owners that want to go in the data center and see the lights flashing on “their” server. We need to start immediately demonstrating the benefits of virtualization to these folks: improved availability, DR, simplified test/dev, etc.
I do see IT shops achieving near 100% virtualized environments, which is encouraging. The common factor here is that virtualization was driven by both IT and the business—both entities shared a common vision and understood the return on investment.
