The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs

lgmac writes "A new survey on the results of Enterprise use of virtualization shows that the process is seeing wide and appreciative use. Technical hurdles are obviously the biggest problem facing corporate IT shops. Just the same, political squabbles among IT staffers fighting for turf after being forced to work together in new ways seems to be a going concern as well. 'Technical woes rank higher--to be expected when CIOs deploy a new technology such as virtualization. However, the politics pain many of you. Remember, virtualization not only asks people to cede some control over their physical server kingdoms, but also asks IT experts from different realms to work more closely together.'"

Comments

Can't we all just get along?

[truthsearch]

Technology is continually changing. Those who adapt will be the most successful. Those who don't will eventually be pushed aside. Fighting over turf won't get you far in a corporate environment in the long term.

as a systems engineer

[sammy baby]

In my experience as a systems engineer, the biggest problem we've had with virtualization is that too many people who don't understand it well view it as a magic wand that you can wave to make all your capacity & provisioning problems disappear.

"Hey! We need a new server to run Blah version 3.0!"
"No problem! Sammy can create a new virtual server!"
"Oh wait - my bad. We actually need a whole farm."
"That's okay, he can whip up a whole batch of them!"

Ad nauseaum. About the worst I've heard was a clueless manager asking me if the resource requirements for Oracle 10g could be relaxed because we were running it on VMware. I actually found myself calling a "come to Jesus" meeting in which I explained, in as simple terms as I could, that "making the system virtual" doesn't mean that hardware requirements go away. Very, very few applications get faster when you put them on equivalent hardware, only virtualized.

This is not a problem with virtualization

[davidwr]

This is a problem with management and/or the IT staff.

Management should run the company in a way that cooperation is rewarded not punished. Consolidation to save money shouldn't result in harm to those who are making it happen or anyone else for that matter.

The IT staff as well as all of the other employees and officers should have the attitude that if it's good for the company and not bad for anyone else it's the right thing to do.

Re:Windows on LINUX? Or LINUX on Windows?

[jojo1835]

Yeah... which is why you run it under VMware 3i. No "Native" OS to worry about, just pure hypervisor goodness.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html

Have a great day!

Tim

You win the golden marble

[toadlife]

Many large virtualized deployments include very advanced technologies such as shared SANs, shared infrastructure, and complex virtualization tools. Correctomundo.

We recently moved everything into virtua-land, complete with a hige SAN, fiberchannel switches, blade servers - the whole nine yards.

While I do think the move was a net positive, the complication of 60 physical servers was more or less replaced by the complication of all the new SAN/Bladecenter components and their interdependency.

One particular thing we've run into is "firmware hell", where you have several components in the chain that all require firmware updates and all depend on each other.