This week’s VMTN podcast was Title: #69 - The Virtualization Journey with Vittorio Viarengo was a discussion about the steps for driving a successful virtualization adaption.  You can also download the podcast on iTunes. For years now I have had a tag line that I use. It’s my motto, if you will, and goes like this: “Virtualization is a journey, not a project.”   Profound isn’t it?  This is something I firmly believe in and have been preaching over the years.  The idea is that there are steps that happen during this virtualization journey that happened at the different stages of your deployment.  Without a doubt the first step is having the front line people, namely the administrators that will build, control and support the environment. Vittorio continued with the second step of getting the application owners on board as well as some trust in the infrastructure so that over time virtualization will become more accepted and would be the first thing the application owners would choose going forward. He went on to his third step of getting the C level manager or director on board and committed to virtualization moving forward to establish a virtual machine first policy in the infrastructure.

I fully believe in that concept and this falls right in line with my understanding of how things need to play out in a company to get the VM first policy in place but, I disagree with the order of the steps.  I believe you need the C- level signoff as step two and the application owners step three. Let me explain my reasoning for this difference of opinion.  Application owners that I have had the pleasure of working with over the years have had to take ownership of an application that they may be knowledgeable about or may not have any experience on that application at all and they were given the task to learn and deploy. These guys and gals will read and memorize the release notes and this is the guide that they will live by as well as the vendors System Engineer that is guiding the application owner on the install.  I am happy to report that things have gotten better over the years as far as third party and OEM’s accepting and supporting their products in a virtual environment. In the olden days, when virtualization was in its early infancy, venders and OEM’s were not so quick to jump on the virtualization band wagon and would be quick to say that they would not support their product running in a virtual machine. Can you believe the nerve of these guys? So easy to say “we won’t support virtual machines”. Oh those where the days and although support has gotten better it is not fully there yet, across the board. This is the main reason but you also need to squash the company politics right from the get go. So getting the C level manager and/or Director on board to support the company’s virtualization journey and to make sure everyone in the organization is on the same page about the vision and direction the company is about to follow.  There is actually another step for the C-level but I will come back to that in a second. Once you can get a policy in place then overall acceptance in the company will be much easier.  This leaves some Managers in a position to push back on venders, if needed.  Some phone calls might start sounding  something like this; “You will support your product on a virtual machine because that is what we use.  If you need help with some of the testing or anything we the company will be more than happy to help you with that but you will support us or we switch to a new product.”

Now the focus will shift to step three, the application owners and working with them to educate them on the power of virtualization as well as a little bit of training about what kind of resources they would really need to run this application.  No you do not need a four way virtual machine with four gigabits of RAM to be your DHCP server.  That is a different blog post altogether but understanding, communication and trust needs to be built with the application owners. It is their butt on the line when something happens to the application regardless if the failure was something they could not control. Once you build the trust the world is a better place for all.

I mentioned earlier that the C level manager and/or director really had two steps in this process and now we work towards the second step with management.  Sometime during your deployment you will come up to what I call the “Magic Moment.”  If one of my past assignments this “magic moment” was during an offsite disaster recovery test. I was able to prove to all a big reason why virtualization was the next best thing since the computer.  I got to help design a rock solid disaster recovery plan and with living in the middle of hurricane central, this was a very good place to shine.  Once I was given the green light that the LUNS were presented to the offsite virtual infrastructure I was able to recover the infrastructure in a matter of minutes and a lot of people really took notice.  Once we got back from the test absolute full virtualization acceptance across the board happened. What a magic moment to share.

These are the steps that I believe happen on a company’s journey into virtualization and steps to the cloud.  It is never a project but rather a life changing journey moving forward into tomorrow.

ESX, virtualization, vmware

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under vWire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.