The Virtualization Journey for SMBs

vittorioviarengo — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:31:11 +0000

The journey framework that I have been covering in the posts of this blog is applicable to both large and small and medium enterprise, say less than a 1000 people. The main difference between small and large enterprises is the speed at which SMBs move. Most of the ones we interviewed said they went from 0 to (virtually) 100% in 12-18 months. This is mainly because:

The CIO sits in the same room with the rest of the team (typically less that 10 people overall) in most decisions, so when they get comfortable with the technology they immediately get top level air cover
The business is not as involved in the technical decisions, so there is less FUD and push back from application owners. When IT is comfortable with the virtualization technology, then they go ahead and quickly virtualize everything that comes their way including business applications and databases
Their IT scale is smaller (typically 100-500 servers)
It is easier for them to change their processes, thus removing friction and shortening the path to full value realization
There don’t have barriers between network, storage, network and security teams which is one of the biggest obstacle to virtualization
Because they reach critical mass quickly, they benefit by automating management using features like DRS early in the journey
For the same reason they can have a robust DR solution across most of the assets very early in their journey

We hear many of them saying “we virtualized the whole environment in 12 months, and we have not bought a physical server since“

Obstacles

One of the biggest obstacles we heard from SMBs is need to buy pre-tested configurations of server, storage, network and virtualization software. They don’t have the staff and the time to go through lengthy evaluation and testing and because they are not big companies, they don’t get the same level of attention from the vendors.

Quality of Life

interestingly and refreshingly, the ‘better quality of life’ theme came up very often in out SMBs interviews.

One example if the ability to do disruption-free hardware maintenance thanks to vMotion: “We don’t have to come in during weekends to do hardware maintenance and upgrade anymore, we vMotion the virtual machine to a different server and we do this during working hours without business disruption“.

Another good one is the use od DRS to automatically manage the virtual infrastructure based on quality of service policies: “We used to obsess about whether all my server lights were green, now DRS does that for us“

Vittorio

Virtualization Adoption Journey

vittorioviarengo — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:10:28 +0000

In my previous post I wanted to talk about the project I am working on at VMware and why I am about to hit the road and go listen to a number of customers. I ended up rambling about how to listen to customers, what to listen for and so on and never got to describe the project. So here it goes.

VMware has a huge number of deployed customers that have virtualized all kinds of workloads (a term we use to describe what runs within a virtual machine). As it often happens, customers are using our technology in ways that we may not have anticipated.

Also, some customers have been more aggressive than others about their use of virtualization technology and have virtualized most of their infrastructure, while others have virtualized 1000′s of servers but mostly within the realm of a given type of workload (say web servers).

The Journey

The main question we are trying to answer is: what is the typical virtualization journey?

Is there a typical journey in the first place? Is there one by industry? Company size? Workload type?

In my first month here at VMware, I talked to many smart people (primarily people close to the customers such as in professional service, system engineers, sales etc) and I got some good answers to the above questions. What I want to do now is to go directly to the source and find out from our customers and from their perspective how they achieved high level of virtualization and why.

A Different type of Listening

If you read my previous post on listening to customers, it was inspired by years of working in either a product management or product development capacity. In that context, I was typically meeting customers to validate a new product idea or gather input for a new release of an existing product. This time is different.

I don’t have an idea to validate or requirements to gather. I don’t really have a preconceived notion of what I am going to find out. I am just going out there, listen and learn what our customers have done with VMware technology.

This is not going to be a quantitative type of research. It is going to be qualitative. We want to find out

When – the project started and finished
Why – the project got started
What – was virtualized
What – products were used
How – it was done
Who – drove the project
Who – helped
Who – sponsored it
What – were the technical and business results
What – processes and organizations changed as a result
How/When/Why – the project influenced the next one

This last point is critical. We really want to understand the relationship between multiple virtualization projects and how they come together in an overall journey (when they do).

We selected a number of customers in different geographies and in different stages of virtualization adoption. Cant’ wait to meet them.

Let the learning begin!!