Virtualization Journey

Last week, I participated in a cloud panel at Interop in Las Vegas with Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Randy Rowland (Terremark)

I mostly talked about the Virtualization Journey as a necessary condition to build a private cloud.

Based on what I leanred from customers, I positioned the journey as the mechanism to provide existing applications with the core characteristic of cloud computing, that is

• Abstraction
• Pooling
• Elasticity
• Management Automation

As I discussed in multiple posts in the past, from a business perspective the journey starts with consolidation and savings, it evolves around business continuity and quality of services and it lands with business agility. From a cloud readiness perspective, it starts with abstration and pooling, then moves to elasticity and management automation.

Here is the video, the panel starts around minute 9

Vittorio

In previous posts, I covered the 3 main stages of virtualization adoption, I drilled down into the IT Production Phase and gave an overview of  the Business Production phase.

The transition from IT production to Business Production is the most critical part of the virtualization journey and many customers are dealing with it right now. Let’s dive deeper into it.

Business Production Key Adoption Elements

First, lt’s take a look at the characteristics of the key journey adoption elements in this phase

Confidence

Confidence refers to the level of competence and experience that the IT team has around virtualization technology. While in the IT Production phase we describe confidence as reactive, in the Business production phase confidence is better described as selective. Wha I mean is that the team is not yet ready to virtualize everything that comes their way but they are getting there. They selectively apply virtualization to increasingly more challenging workloads.

In IT production there is a big inflection point when the team learns how to use vMotion as it unlocks their ability to perform maintenance without downtime and start demonstrating one of the most tangible and visible advantages of virtualization: abstraction and workload mobility.

In Business production there are multiple confidence inflection point as the team learns how to deploy products such as SRM for disaster recovery, HA and FT for business continuity and quality of service, DRS for automatic resource management, and VMWare view for Virtual Desktop deployment. These are the products that build out the platform needed to properly support the virtualization of business applications and databases.

Sponsorship

This is the stage of the journey where the sponsorship level for the virtualization initiative is most critical to adoption and success. As I discussed in this other post, there are different stakeholders at the table during this phase such as Application Owners and Database Administrators. To properly win their concerns and get to the resistance is futile stage, IT teams have to get application owners comfortable with the technology. This is typically achieved in one of 2 ways

1. Address their Technical Concerns
   Show them their apps/DBs running virtual, set up a demo of vMotion, HA, FT and so on. Show them that apps run better in the virtual environment.
2. Go over their Head
   Seek a higher level of sponsorship in the organization, ideally the CIO.

Point 1 above is the slower path. You look for a suitable application, you buddy up with the application owner, get him/her comfortable with demo and POCs, you go ahead and virtualize the app, measure the results and evangelize the success. Ideally, turn the app owner into a virtualization evangelist. We have seen this over and over again.

But… if the IT operation team is very comfortable with virtualization technology and with the management products mentioned above (HA, FT, DRS etc), the best and fastest way to achieve both 1 and 2 above it to lead the process from a business perspective, turn it into a business case. Depending on the business application at stake and the requirements and constraints around it, the business case can be made around business continuity, better SLA, faster provisioning (or even self service where applicable), faster time to market for new versions combined with the usual cost saving from hardware consolidation.

This is how you get the attention of the senior management team which in turn will give you air cover to win over the application owners and database administrators.

Value

Business value is always a key to drive any sort of transformation and technology adoption. As mentioned above the key in this phase is to switch the value proposition from consolidation and cost saving to business continuity and better service level for business applications. We have seen this in every customer that is successfully going through the Business Product phase. Cost saving for consolidation is “last decade” value prop to them. It is taken for granted. It becomes all about building a better environment to run Virtual Desktops, Business Applications and Databases.

I always use this example that stuck with me as I was interviewing our customers on their journey last year. After meeting with 4 customers that were squarely in the IT Production phase, I met with this IT professional who told me, and I quote: “I am virtualizing a mission critical application that manages 40 billion dollars in revenue every year and I am doing it because as long as that application runs physical, I don’t sleep tight”.

Back then, I did not realize exactly what I was looking at. Now, after more than 50 in-depth customer interviews I know. I was looking at a customer in the middle of the business production phase with a very high level of confidence and clearly the right level of sponsorhip. He was even willing to go down to a 1 to 1 consolidation ratio (in certain cases) to get the benefits of the virtualization platform. He was clearly past the consolidation stage.

Do you see this?

If you are a customer of ours and you are not yet thinking this way, it means that you are not there yet and you should look at the key elements above (confidence, sponsorship and Value) and see which one you should work on to move forward.

Do you have the right experience but you are getting push back from the app owners? From the Top? Do you have the right mandate but you don’t have the confidence to tackle business applications? Do you have a formal way of tracking the business value you are deriving from your virtualization projects? Is it just around cost savings? Are you reporting it routinely to your management team?

We are rolling out tools to help our field and our customers answering these questions and in the next few posts I will share some of the business production obstacles and best practices that we learned form our own customers

Ciao

Vittorio

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

I was reading the white paper that is reachable from this site that our colleagues in the UK launched today. It is about removing IT from the boardroom agenda, which is a little counter intuitive. As IT professionals we do want IT to be strategic to our business but too often we end up on that agenda for the wrong reasons: budget overruns, application outages, delays and so on.

Virtualization has been recognised as a very effective way to increase server utilization therefore cutting on hardware and maintenance costs. But this is just a part of a bigger story. As we learned from our customers, server consolidation for cost efficiency is just the first step of their virtualization journey which then evolves along two main additional phases that we call Business Production and ITaaS. At each step of the journey, IT addresses different issues that are at the core of most board room agendas:

• Cost control
• Business continuity
• Business agiilty

We are all familiar with the cost saving benefits of virtualization, let’s talk about business  continuity and business agility (see also this post on the topic)

Business Production

Customers move into this stage when they first virtualize a mission critical application or database. When we talk to customers who are in this phase, we hear that the predominant reason why they do this is to achieve better business continuity and quality of service for their business applications. These customers have a higher level of sophistication compared to the ones that are still in the consolidation phase. They still enjoy cost saving from consolidating servers but that is not the driving business proposition enymore. They are now addressing another big board room level concern: business continuity.

ITaaS

This is the more advanced stage of virtualization adoption journey. It is the point of no return where customers have virtualized more than 50% of their systems and virtualization becomes their default computing platform. These customers are clearly on the path to the private cloud. Most of them don’t call it that. They don’t yet refer to this stage as their private cloud but when we break down what we mean by private cloud as in the following diagram

then they nod their head and generally agree that this is what they are doing through their virtualization journey.

Indeed if we agree on the above definition of cloud computing, then you can see how customers are already building the foundation for their cloud even in the early stages by creating the abstraction and pooling layer through virtualization. Then they tackle the service layer and quality of service (Control) in the Business Production phase and finally move into Zero-Touch Infrastructure as they achieve higher level of provisioning, self-service, management and scaling automation in the ITaaS phase.

Much more on topic later.

The increased level of automation achieved in this later stage gives our customers a much more agile IT infrastructure which helps them address two additional concerns of the board room: time to market for business services and applications and the ability to respond faster to changes in business requirements.

Off that Agenda then…

So, based on what we learned from our most advanced customers, there is a strong correlation between their level of adoption of virtualization technology and private cloud computing and their ability to be on the board room agenda for the right reasons. Stay tuned as I get permission to publish the details of some of these customers stories in the near future.

Vittorio

In my previous post I talked about what are the key elements that drive the adoption of VMware virtualization technology in our customer base.

After looking at dozens of customer journeys directly and  indirectly through various customer proxies (Sales Account Managers, VMware Consultants and Technical Account Managers (TAM), etc) we find that customers are in one of three stages that we are going to call:

• IT Production
• Business Production
• ITaaS (IT as as Service)

There is also a stage zero where companies just experiment with the technology. I am not going to address this phase here. I am concerned with projects that take virtualization into production like with all the customers we interviewed in the journey project.

The chart show all key elements for adoption: Sponsorship/ownership, Confidence and Value. These evolve pretty significantly over time with two major inflection points along the way.

Each of these three stage is worth its own post. In this article I will address how the journey evolves at the high level.

IT Production

This is the Cost-Efficiency phase, building the core technology and skills base by virtualizing IT-owned applications, and benefiting from the value of server consolidation.

Sponsorship/Ownership
In the IT Production phase, IT organization virtualize what they own. In fact at this stage it is not really a matter of sponsorship, it is more matter of ownership. They are comfortable with the technology from previous experimentation or deployments and they are now ready to virtualize the applications where they don’t need to ask permission to the business.

Confidence
At this stage, confidence can be characterized as reactive. The team reacts to a business trigger such as hardware refresh or data center consolidation by using virtualization technology. They typically deploy the VMware hypervisor and the core management platform and they start virtualizing the low hanging fruits: File,Print, Web servers, domain controllers, Test and Development servers. At this stage they are building up their virtualization skills. They don’t tackle applications that are perceived to be riskier or that require them to fight tricky political and cultural battles. Just not yet.

Value
The predominant value proposition in this phase is consolidation of IT infrastructure to save on hardware, space and cooling. Customers also end up with some nice by-product and capability such as faster provisioning, a better storage infrastructure (required to deploy VMotion and other useful virtualization features). This creates the technical and knowledge platform to target more interesting applications and for future growth.

Business Production

The Quality of Service phase, tackling business applications (such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP, Oracle Apps, Databases etc) while adopting more of the VMware product stack (such as DRS, SRM or View) with a rapid switch of the value proposition towards better SLAs, business continuity and overall quality of service.

This is a major chasm that customers have to cross on their way to high level of virtualization penetration. I will probably spend multiple articles on this phase in the future, addressing triggers, obstacles, best practices and examples. This is just a quick summary.

Sponsorship
In the Business Production phase, the IT organization which is driving the virtualization agenda needs to find new level of sponsorship for the journey to progress. They have virtualized all the low hanging fruits, everything that they owned. Next step: business applications.

To do so, they now need to get the “Application Owner” on board. Application owners bring about new concerns besides saving money by consolidating servers. They care about performance, lowering risk, quality of service, time to market for new versions of the application, business continuity, planned and unplanned downtime. This is why every single customer we talked to who is in this phase learned how to address these concerns by painting a different value proposition than just server consolidation. They use VMware product features such as SRM, High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) to provide better quality of service (and performance) for their business applications running in a virtual environment.

Confidence
Confidence can be characterized as selective at this stage. The team carefully selects the first applications to virtualize based on a path of least resistance for their organization. “Do I have a good relationship with that application owner?, “Do I have skills to virtualize the application in question?”, “What are the risks associated with virtualizing it?”, “What are the risks associated with NOT virtualizing it?”, “Does the ISV support the application in a virtual environment?”, “Is there a compelling reason to virtualize this particular app (lack of HA, deploying a new version, non-satisfactory uptime…)?”…

Often the seed for virtualizing a business application is planted when a new version is being developed and tested. This process may already be happening in a virtual environment and when the app is going into production, deploying it on a physical server introduces a risky architectural discontinuity. It often makes sense to just leave it running in a virtual environment and take it into production.

After the first couple of business applications are successfully virtualized things get easier, the confidence grows fast and soon the team is ready to take on most business applications. Evangelizing the success and the business value achieved is a critical success factor in this stage. We found that customers do very creative things to make this happen. I will share some of these stories in the upcoming posts.

Value
In this phase the predominant value proposition is quality of service along pillars such as business continuity, lower downtime risks, faster provisioning, time to market and so on. It is actually pretty interesting how dramatic is the change in the type of value people associate with virtualization as they make the transition from IT Production to Business Production. More on this below.

Virtualization First Policy

“Virtualization First” policy refers to an IT mandate by which the VMware-based virtualized environment become the default deployment model. Physical servers are only provisioned on an exception basis and only when there is a strong technical or business justification.

Many of the customers we interviewed have such a policy in place but there are differences in when they put it in place and how well they enforce it.

Timing
Some customers put this policy in place very early but they don’t enforce it very well and it is pretty easy to make the case for getting a physical server.

Other customers, put this policy in place for the type of applications that they have experience virtualizing at any of the three stages. In fact, the ability to enforce this policy is highly correlated to IT confidence and maturity around VMware technology.

Enforcement
Some other customers put the policy in place after successfully virtualizing few business applications. At that point virtualization tend to get on the radar of higher level of management in the organization and in the same way as increased confidence influences their ability to enforce the policy, increased level of sponsorship provides even better teeth.  When the sponsorship is at the highest level (such as in the ITaaS Phase), that is the ultimate enforcement and empowering function.

ITaaS

In the IT as as Service phase, virtualization is just part of what IT does. Everything new is deployed on virtual, and the value is all around time to market, process automation, and ultimately business agility.

Sponsorship
In this stage, the sponsor for the virtualization journey is all the way tot the top of the organization (typically the CIO). Tracking the value delivered over time raised the visibility of the virtualization journey and it is now a top initiative for the CIO, sometimes with MBOs associated to virtualization penetration and speed of adoptions for the CIO’s reports.

Confidence
Confidence is very high. Most of the product stack has been adopted, including SRM, DRS, Lab Manager, HA, FT and so on. The virtualization team is often folded back into the core server team as virtualization is just part of what IT does.

Value
At this stage organization are looking to scale their virtualization effort so that they can in turn scale the associated benefits that come from process automation, better resiliency, and increased quality of services.

Some customers refer to this state as their “internal cloud” when resources can be allocated on demand where and when needed. IT is nimble. Their credibility has improved throughout the journey and (in their own word) their quality of life is better. They don’t obsess about hardware failures because they know they can move the impacted VMs around. They use DRS to automatically increase resource allocation on the fly. They have a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy or even a complete solution in place. They are looking at or implementing their desktop virtualization roadmap.

Conclusions

These are the three main stages that characterize most customer virtualization journeys we have seen: IT production, Business Production and ITaaS.

The adoption is driven by IT confidence, level of sponsorship and tracking the business value delivered by each project.

There is a major chasm/inflection point around the time customers move from virtualizing IT infrastructure services and tes/dev servers to their first business applications. When they do cross this chasm, the value proposition that they track, perceive and sell internally radically shifts from server consolidation and CAPEX savings, to better quality of service, OPEX savings and better business continuity.

What’s Next

In the next few posts I am going to

• Talk more about the value path for virtualization and what is the relationship between business triggers, product functional areas, capabilities and value
• drill down on each phase and use specific examples to talk about obstacles, best practice, evangelization techniques and so on

Ciao

Vittorio

In previous posts, I covered the 3 main stages of virtualization adoption and the key elements driving the virtualization journey. Just a reminder that most of the material in these posts comes directly from our customers through a primary research project that we carried out last summer.

Let’s now double-click on the IT Production phase.

In this phase the IT department is the main driver for virtualization in a bottom up type of approach. They virtualize the assets that they own such as file and print servers, domain controllers, web servers, Citrix servers, and so on. Test and Dev servers are also a primary candidate for virtualization at this stage.

Key Drivers

Here is the typical status of the key virtualization drivers in IT production:

Confidence

The confidence is reactive, meaning that the team has enough knowledge and experience to react to certain triggers (see blow for the list of typical triggers) but virtualization is not the predominant computing platform yet. The team knows how to install and operate ESX/ESXi but they are typically not familiar with more advanced features like SRM, DRS, HA and FT. There is a big inflection point in term of confidence when the team learns how to use vMotion as it allows them to perform system maintenance without downtime. It is not unusual to see customers organize internal demos around vMotion to show its power to other divisions and/or to the business.

Sponsorship

The sponsorship at this stage is typically at the IT manager or IT director level, especially in bigger companies. In smaller companies the CIO has more visibility into most projects going on in his or her org. In many cases, we cannot even talk about sponsorship as much as ownership as IT tends to virtualize what they own first.  There are cases where the sponsorship is at the senior level but in many cases the virtualization first policy is not enforced aggressively yet.

Value

The predominant value that drives virtualization in this stage is cost saving from servers consolidation. These saves are so significant that they overshadow some of the additional benefits the come from virtualization such as faster provisioning, better manageability, less downtime etc. More on business value further down in this post.

Obstacles

Our customers told us that at the beginning of their journeys, these where the three biggest obstacles  in the way of virtualization projects:

Team Communication

Or lack of thereof. Virtualization technology cuts across multiple teams and disciplines: servers, storage, network, and security. Virtualization is typically introduced into IT by the server team without necessarily involving the other teams that will be impacted by the transformation.

In many customers this has been the main obstacle to more efficient adoption and in turn value realization.

It is very important to:

• Train all teams involved on virtualization technology
• Keep communicating across teams as the transformation takes place over time.

We found customers who even re-organized their IT around virtualization to facilitate adoption and optimize their processes.

Virtualization FUD

This is somewhat related to the previous point. As much as virtualization has become mainstream in thousands of IT shops and it is running mission critical applications in some of the largest data centers the world over, there are still IT professionals that don’t fully understand how it works and what are its advantages. This is natural with any technology transformation but this FUD does get in the way of wider adoption of virtualization.

We learned some very interesting tactics that customers use to overcome this obstacle. Some examples:

vMotion Demo
This is a big hit amongst our customers. They use vMotion to show in a very effective way some of the things that virtualization can do for the business such as  disruption-less maintenance, lower risk from hardware failure, and so on. Later in the journey, the vMotion demo is replaced by demos of even more sophisticated features such as High Availability and Fault Tolerance.

Show and Tell
Virtualization champions within our customers often take the show on the road and they go around the company educating people about the technical and business advantages of virtualization. Sometimes they use a successful internal project that they did, some other times they just hold a virtualization workshop using material from our web site or other blogs.

Virtualize Under the Radar
At the beginning of the journey a lot of virtualization happens below the radar as IT virtualizes the assets that they own directly. Later in the journey FUD from application owners and the business side becomes more of a factor and slows down adoption. This is where we found that some of our most confident customers just go ahead and virtualize applications without really telling their business counterparts. I know, this is controversial but true. The attitude of  these customers is along these lines: “I don’t let the business tell me how to run my infrastructure. If I decide that virtualization is the right computing platform for a given application, I just do it”. If you think about it, the business does not really care what brand hard drive IT uses right? Overtime the same will be true for whether an application or a database runs physical or virtual. It is indeed true for some customers today where virtualization is the default computing platform. It is a factor of their confidence, credibility and experience.

Storage Architecture

Storage architecture is the third major obstacle we found in IT production. Many of our customers told us that if they could do it all over again they would spend more time figuring out the right storage architecture from the get-go that

• works well with virtualization (and vMotion and all the advanced virtualization features)
• supports future growth

I am not the right person to go deep on this issue. I will look for an expert at VMware and interview him or her about storage best practices in one of the future posts.

Triggers and Capabilities

As covered in this post, we developed a framework to model the relationship between business triggers, VMware product deployed, resulting capabilities and business value realized.

In the IT Production stage, these are the typical business triggers that ignite a virtualization project:

• Major hardware refresh
• Data center migration/ consolidation
• Merger / acquisition
• Standardization/Organizational Change
• Outages (application, system)
• Increased capability/ confidence
• Cost cutting initiatives
• Capacity constraints (power, cooling, CPU, space)

Customers respond to these triggers by deploying the basic virtualization platform around ESXi with related management tools (vCenter).

The capability that are achieved by deploying these products include:

• Massive consolidation
• Space, cooling, hardware, energy savings
• Have a lot more floor space
• Faster Provisioning
• Do more with Less
• Excess capacity for future growth

Faster provisioning in particular is a capability that fosters more adoption of virtualization and positively impacts the IT team credibility. It is not unusual for customers to cut down their provisioning cycle form weeks to days, sometimes hours.

These capabilities map pretty directly into the following business value categories

• Capital Avoidance Saves
• IT Operations Efficiency
• Green Saves

Where the predominant value is Capital saves from consolidations as mentioned above.

Development-Related Triggers

There is also another set of triggers that prompts customer to deploy VMware’s development life-cycle management area such as Lab Manager. These triggers include:

• Major application upgrade/Changes
• Need to improve application life-cycle efficiency/ quality
• Major OS refresh

From deploying this area of the VMware product line customers typically get these set of capabilities in return:

• Reduce the cost of application development life-cycle
• Faster set up of development seats
• Reproduce bug/incident events for resolution
• Replay events to identify incident root cause

This is probably the first area in most customers journeys where the value proposition from virtualization is not predominantly around cost saving from consolidation. There will be many more examples in the following stages (Business production and ITaaS, see this post of an overview).

In fact, when deploying products such as vCenter Lab Manager, customers typically realize lower cost for their testing infrastructure, increased application development efficiency and faster time to market for new applications.

What’s Next

In the next post, I will cover some of the IT Production best practices that we learned from our customers.

Vittorio

The Journey stages I discussed in this post cover most of the customers we interviewed so far.

There are few exceptions. I talked about the case where customers start their journey in the Business Production phase virtualizing production databases. A minority.

There is also another pattern that is notably different: ISVs (Independent Software Vendors).

ISVs make software for a living, so optimizing their Dev, Test, QA environment is mission critical for them. Moreover the number of test and dev servers they own typically outnumbers the servers they use to run their business.

As a result their stage I (test and dev) is both much prolonged and much bigger in scale. One may say that they reach stage 3 which is typically characterized by >50% virtualized servers without ever going through phase II (Business production).

For example, I interviewed a large ISV last week. They have 18,000 test and dev servers vs. <200 servers that run business applications. They virtualized 50% of their test and dev servers saving north of 20 million but they have not tackled their business applications yet. In a typical enterprise customer scenario when the virtualization percentage reaches 25-30%, that’s when customers typically start virtualizing business applications and databases switching the value proposition from server consolidation to better SLA and business continuity. In the ISV example above, virtualizing more test and dev is where they are going to get the biggest business benefits as they are vastly improving their development efficiency and the quality of their software while at the same time cutting support and hardware costs.

Besides aggressively virtualizing more test and dev servers on their way to 100% virtualized environment, they are also increasing the level of provisioning and management automation by deploying self-service capabilities. Their  target is 30% self-service penetration within a year.

In summary, although the three stages of adoption apply to most enterprise customers, there are exceptions that highlights interesting use cases and best practices.

All scenarios seem to have one thing in common thou: what drives high level of virtualization adoptions are clear business drivers that are beyond server consolidation.

Vittorio

Now that I got your attention…. let’s talk about a couple if customer interviews where virtualizing production databases came up and the first step of their journey.

In the Customer Journey stages post, I covered how the majority of the customers we interviewed start their journey in the IT production stage where they virtualize test and dev servers and IT infrastructure applications like file, print, domain controllers and so on.

There are exceptions. The more interesting one is when some mid-size companies (say 1000 to 20,000 people)  start their journey virtualizing critical production databases. I personally talked to two of them and heard about others from our system engineers.

Why do they do that? Most customers virtualize production databases and business applications in what we call the Business Production phase. What made these other customers start from databases?

There are tons of material about how to best virtualize database on VMware. In this post I want to cover what I learned from a business perspective from these two aggressive customers.

Biggest Bang for the Buck

Both of the customers I talked to said that virtualizing databases would give them the best bang for the buck based on better management, better performance, better quality of service. DB License saving was also mentioned as a factor.

They both sold the project internally around, and I quote:

“Databases will run faster and will have better management and instantaneous failover capability”

“I wanted to give my customers (the business owners of these databases, that is)  more memory, more network and more CPU, VMware running on updated hardware allowed me to do that”

“I demonstrated and documented that performance was going to be better in the new virtualized environment”

They did not sold the value proposition of server consolidation, although it was definitely a factor.

So, how does a database run faster in a virtual environment? Well, most of these databases were running on relatively old and under-utilized machines. By upgrading them to a new modern server running VMware, these customers could allocate more resources to each database instance therefore achieving better performance.  Moreover, thanks to VMware HA and FT, they could provide their internal customers with better business continuity without deploying more complex clustering solutions from the database vendors.

Although consolidation was not the main driver, one of the two customers went from 200 physical servers down to 25. He said he was not too concerned with the consolidation ratio anyway as he wanted to keep some performance buffer in there just in case. The intent is to be more more aggressive at the next refresh cycle once he has more data about how the databases perform over time. This is definitely a best practice we heard form many customers in the Business Production stage.

Everything Else Will Be Easy

Both customers said that one of the reasons they chose production databases as the starting point of their journey was that by making them work they would get instant credibility for their team and for virtualization. This would make it easy to virtualize less mission critical workloads going forward and would take the FUD about virtualization off the table for ever.

It is not by chance that both customers have a >80% virtualization penetration and are working actively to get to 100%.

Confidence+Sponsorship

How did these customers jumped stage one (IT Production) and be successful?

As covered in the this previous post, the key drivers of successful virtualization journeys are Sponsorship, Confidence and Value. Both customers had the three elements taken care o:

Confidence
Both technical leads where highly competent, credible and involved in the technical details.

They both formally trained their teams, and not just the server team but also network, storage and security. One of them did not trained the network guys initially and regretted it later and some of the network architecture had to be redesigned later in the process. This is too a best practice. Formally train the team on virtualization across multiple disciplines.

Sponsorship
Both technical sponsor were very senior in the technical ranks and had a direct path to the CIO who was involved from the beginning and both formally reported the technical and business results achieved to the top.

Value
Both customers skipped the IT production phase where the prevalent value proposition is cost savings from server consolidation and went directly to phase two. Interestingly, the value proposition that they used to sell the project internally and to track the business value delivered was around business continuity and quality of service. This is very consistent with other customers who got to stage 2 after going through IT production first. The difference is that these two customers moved much faster in their virtualization journey after establishing their credibility virtualizing mission critical databases in their first project.

Conclusions

I would not suggest to start the virtualization journey from production databases to most customers, but now I have seen it work for some.

Maybe we should create a swat team at VMware that goes around and does this full time. A way to accelerate the journey?

Vittorio

More information about virtualizing SQL Server here: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/sql/

and Oracel DB here: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/oracle/

In the “Key Adoption Drivers” post, I covered what the main drivers for virtualization adoption are and in the “Virtualization Journey Stages” post we saw how the virtualization journey evolves along three main stages that are characterized by:

• Different type of applications being virtualized (IT infrastructure, test and dev, business applications, databases…)
• Level of organizational and process maturity
• Different business value delivered

The three stage framework represents the first axis of the virtualization journey adoption:

Business Value Evolution

One of the most interesting findings from our customers interviews was how the value proposition that virtualization delivers evolves across the journey. Mind you, I am talking about what customers told us, not what VMware marketing says.

At the beginning of the journey (IT Production), it is all about cost efficiency around server consolidation, space, power and cooling savings.

When customers enter into the Business Production phase and they start virtualizing business applications and production databases, the value proposition is all around better quality of service and business continuity. This shift is sudden and dramatic. It is like cost savings from consolidation is taken for granted at this stage and customers switch their focus on faster provisioning, better capacity management, reliability and process automation for their business applications.  This is where features such as High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT) and SRM become important.

At the right side of the journey, it is all about business agility. Customers are on a path to virtualize as much as they can of the IT environment so that they can scale up the benefits derived from virtualization and achieve more process automation, faster time to market, and dynamic allocation of resources to cope with varying demand. This is the stage that gets them closest to running a private cloud. More on this in later posts.

The Second Axis of Adoption: the VMware Product Stack

The journey also evolves along a second axis: the VMware Product Adoption that is which functional areas of the VMware product portfolio a customer deploys overtime.

There are five main functional domains in the VMware product portfolio (pre-SpringSource acquisition):

• Infrastructure Consolidation (ESXi and core vCenter)
• Application Development Quality and Efficiency (Lab Manager)
• Cost Effective Availability and Disaster Recovery (SRM, HA and FT)
• Desktop Security, Mobility and Support Efficiency (View, Workstation)
• Virtualization Efficiency and IT process Automation (DRS, Lifecycle Manager)

The core platform  with ESXi and the basic management capabilities of vCenter provide the foundation for hardware abstraction, consolidation and CAPEX savings along the whole journey. To unlock the higher level business value of virtualization, customers need to adopt and deploy the upper layers of VMware product stack.

SpringSource add some very nice application management and monitoring capabilities with Hyperic, a lightweight development framework (Spring + Tools) and a lightweight run-time container (tc Server).

Although adoption stages and product adoption are somewhat related (e.g. customer who virtualize mission critical applications tend to aggressively deploy features such as HA and FT),  each customer will follow their very own path in deploying the different functional areas of VMware’s product stack. The path mainly depends on what their business triggers are (e.g. running out of data center space, hardware refresh, security compliance on the desktop) and their business priorities.

Business Triggers to Business Value Framework

As part of our customer journey project, we built a taxonomy to map triggers to functional areas, to capabilities to business value. This is how we help customers define the custom journey that best maximize business value returns based on their set of triggers and concerns.
To do so, we first enumerated all the business triggers that are relevant to virtualization; then we mapped which product area addresses each business trigger. From there, we listed all the capabilities and the business values that each product area delivers.

This is the high level view of triggers-to-business-area mapping by stage:

And this is the drill down for the set of triggers the typically spark the deployment of Lab Manager.

And the related capability and value mapping

In the next posts, I am going to show how we use this framework to build a customer adoption journey and then how we calculate the ROI across the different business value categories: Cost Efficiency, Quality of Service and Business Agility

Virtualization Journey Q&A Podcast

Today I had a great Q&A session with members of the VMware community about the virtualization journey. The call was facilitated by John Troyer who runs our VMware community and it has been recorded here.

Lively exchange of ideas and great feedback!!

I covered the key elements that drive the adoption of virtualization technology and the three main stages of the journey, then we had a great discussion about adoption obstacles, sponsorship, and organizational structures.

A coupe of takeways

Controversy

When I present our findings on the virtualization journey, there is often controversy around the Business Production phase. As a reminder, the business production phase is when customers virtualize mission critical business applications and databases. This is when IT operations work side by side with Application Owners (e.g. the person who is in charge of running SAP) to virtualize business applications. entering this stage is a critical inflection point as virtualization moves from being an effective tool to consolidate servers (and save power, space and money in the process) to a computing platform that provides better business continuity, disaster recovery and improved SAL (Service Level Agreement).

Some of the best practices that we heard people use to tackle this phase sparkle some very animated debates.

My favorite one is the following:

Best Practice #1:Publish a Roadmap

According to this best practice, when you virtualize business applications you should always tell the application owners and LOBs why you are doing it and what’s in there for them. Many customers do this. They publish a roadmap, they get the app owners comfortable, they execute, track results and share the success stories with other LOBs.

Best Practice #2: Don’t Tell Them

In this best practice, IT just does it. They virtualize business applications and they don’t tell the app owners. Their attitude is “they (LOB) should tell me how to run my infrastructure. I know this technology works and I just do it”.

We absolutely heard both practices applied successfully by different customers. When I bring this up people react violently to either #1 and #2 above. I believe it depends on their level of confidence (the more confident tend to just do it) and level of maturity. In any event, this controversy came up three times in three presentations I did on this at VMworld, with a delegation of CIOs yesterday here at VMware and today during the podcast.

I am just reporting what I heard from customers. Different strategies for different customers.

CIO-Level Sponsorship

The level of sponsorship for virtualization projects evolves over time from lower levels in IT all the way to the CIO at later stages. Today when talking about the Business Production phase, I mentioned that some IT organizations have to convince one application owner at the time about going virtual. Somebody in the audience was very vocal about the fact that companies should go through this phase with a mandate form the CIO in place. This provides the right air cover to address the skeptics objections and move forward swiftly. I could not agree more. The fact is thought that many customers don’t have that top level mandate at this stage and they consequently struggle.

This is an area of focus for us as a company going forward. More on this later.

Keep the feedback coming.

Ciao

Vittorio