The divide between IT and management is stopping virtualisation projects in their tracks.
Server virtualisation has become cheaper and easier to use, but getting budget
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approval for
virtualisation projects is often a challenge for IT professionals. And some organisations still
lack the skilled, trained staff needed to support these projects.
"Getting it up and going initially, the low-hanging fruit, it's easy," said Rod Gabriel, an IT infrastructure engineer at United Financial Services Inc. in Grafton, Wis. "But once you start getting into some of these higher-end systems … then you're getting a little more complex, and you need more knowledge on how you manage that."
The results of TechTarget's "Virtualisation Decisions 2010 Purchasing Intentions Survey" show just how big of an obstacle these organisational challenges have become. Of respondents who said they don't plan to deploy server virtualisation or expand its use in 2010, 29% said it's because they can't get budget approval this year. A combined 29% also identified "lack of in-house management skills" and "lack of in-house installation skills" as roadblocks.
This data marks a shift from 2009 survey data, when the top reasons for not virtualising servers were cost (27%) and complexity (21%). In 2010, the numbers for these responses decreased to 16% and 9%, respectively.
"I find it interesting that there's a shift from 'It's too expensive' to 'My manager won't approve it,'" said Bob Plankers, a virtualisation architect at a large Midwestern university. "There's still a lot of people who don't understand what virtualisation is, but it's one of those things where you have to spend money to save money."
Selling management on virtualisation projects
The fact that more IT pros can't get virtualisation budgets approved, even though fewer think it's
too expensive this year, shows a disconnect between IT departments and their business decision
makers.
"Upper-management buy-in is the biggest thing," said Gabriel, whose firm is almost 100% virtualised. "I sold them early on and convinced them that virtualisation was the way for our company to grow."
But that's easier said than done in many organisations, where the business side of the house may be unfamiliar with virtualisation and view it as just a buzzword or fad, said Jase McCarty, an IT professional who runs the virtualisation blog Jase's Place.
"Management may not be able to see the true ROI of virtualisation and how it can, if implemented properly, actually lower costs," McCarty said.
C.J. Metz, a virtualisation and backup systems administrator at a Fortune 300 company, agreed. Luckily, it's no longer like the early days of virtualisation, when potential customers had to rely solely on vendor information to make their decisions, he said. Now there's an abundance of websites, blogs and other information sources that IT pros can use to sell management on the benefits of virtualisation.
"The information is so much more readily available than it was before," Metz said.
McCarty also noted that all the major vendors offer free products, which make it cheap and easy to do a pilot project. These proof-of-concept deployments can show the business-side decision makers how virtualisation will benefit their organisation, he said.
Virtualisation skills: A bit of this, a bit of that
Survey respondents said virtualisation has gotten easier to use, but that's typically in the early
stages of a project.
"Deploying it is extremely easy," Metz said. "It's really a no-brainer. … You run into more complexity when you get into things like chargeback, automation, resource pools."
The further down the virtualisation road you go, the more likely it is that a lack of skills in your organisation becomes a roadblock. For example, VMware vCenter Server, VMware's management suite, requires a back-end database, and VMware's new cloud offering, vCloud Director, runs only on Oracle databases.
"You have to become a DBA [database administrator]," Plankers said. "That can be daunting in a lot of organisations, especially small businesses."
A lack of skills can also make virtualisation projects look bad to management, hurting the chances that future projects will get approved. For example, some on the business side may think they can't achieve the same performance levels with virtualisation as they can by running applications natively on physical servers. But especially in smaller shops, it's often the case that there aren't enough people (or enough people with the right skills) to do the right tuning to improve performance, McCarty said.
"They blame virtualisation," not the configuration, he said.
What else stops virtualisation projects?
Of course, budgets and lack of skills aren't the only virtualisation roadblocks. Two-thirds of
organisations have virtualised 50% or less of their infrastructure, according to the survey
results, so there's plenty of blame to go around.
Independent software vendors' support policies can make virtualising applications a challenge.
"I still have one or two application vendors who say, 'We don't support that in a virtual server,'" Gabriel said. "But when push comes to shove, they're either going to support it or we'll find another vendor that will."
Virtualisation needs some sort of shared storage, and that also hinders many smaller organisations, Plankers said.
"A lot of it hinges on an enterprise-class storage array," he said. "A lot of shops don't have shared storage."