Experience with a smaller organization’s infrastructure virtualization
Question posed by Nepal Patel on LinkedIn:
Apart from the big players like VMware, Citrix, IBM, HP and so forth, have you had experience with a smaller organizations infrastructure virtualization solution for Enterprise?
I am looking for a more customer centric company, that can be more competitive with the pricing, and will come to bat when needed.
Answer:
I’ve had some experience as an IT Manager & Enterprise Architect in this space.
Sounds like you’re looking for a services company that will assist with consulting around a cost effective virtualization technology. The big questions here are 1) Which product set provides for easy and cost effective entry into server virtualization but still has capacity and scope within the product set for growth to a full enterprise solution; and 2) How easy is it to source people/companies in the marketplace with skills in that product set.
In my personal experience as an implementer, for cost effective entry to virtualization you can’t go past VMWare as they have free products that are very effective. I implemented virtualization with their free products and ran that way for about two years as I gradually virtualized all the servers I could. As I had questions I was able to access people in my personal network and & companies in the marketplace who were knowledgeable on the product set. People were there to ask because techies respect a company (like VMWare) who are willing to _GIVE_ you something that just works and is easy to use with the hope that down the track you might actually buy something from them.
So two years down the virtualization track with my portfolio of virtualized servers I was able to gain capital approval for a big new powerful server (not a blade server and without a SAN as they were too expensive). I also rolled in the VMWare bare metal ESX product (with the customized linux core) and haven’t looked back since.
After it’s run into the ground for a few years the blade and SAN option will be revisited.
I’ve moved on to another company now and am leading them down the same path to virtualization as outlined above. I’m very confident in this methodology as I’ve seen it work in an environment that is very cost conscious.
With the new company, although I’m servicing the local geography of a large multi-national, I have found that there is significant acceptance of the VMWare product-set by Global IT and have found very few barriers to implementation.
Mike Smith – dominoconsultant
