Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

How to Convince Your Boss You Need a Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

Gone are the days when simply telling your boss that you needed the coolest virtual infrastructure management product just like all the other cool companies doing production virtualization would get it for you . Let’s face it. That won’t work these days when layers of approval are common place, endless questions on capital purchases are the norm and budgets are tighter than ever with ROI and TCO part of every ones lexicon and reason for buying. Ok, so what do you do to get the boss into your camp? There are really three areas you should highlight to get your boss to say yes.

The first is an old standby – time to resolve problems. Your first line of defense is that the traditional element management tools you have for physically dedicated environments can be useful, but just don’t cut across all the devices and see the levels of virtual abstraction to give that integrated system view which is vital to understanding virtual environments. Those older tools aren’t designed to see through and track all the virtualized elements because they were designed to support one device type in a silo-like fashion. You know the endless hours that are wasted chasing data, going to meetings or sitting on conference calls trying to find the culprits involved in performance problems that are impacting critical application availability, could all be avoided. You suggest even a conservative assumption of reducing this wasted, always unplanned, activity by 50% would be worth the purchase alone. The average Akorri BalancePoint customer with 100 VMs can identify over $500,000 in staff productivity annually.

Now you’ve got the boss’ attention and move onto the next layer of getting to yes, which is having the right dashboard for today’s virtual and physical infrastructure. I’m a car guy and love all kinds of cars, old or new – it doesn’t matter. I love them all and my wife can attest to the fact that there isn’t an older car I wouldn’t want to drive and own. I also own a few and one of my favorites is a 1933 Chevy 3 window rumble seat coupe. That car is 77 years old and has a dashboard somewhat similar to the modern cars of today’s dashboards. Yes, today’s dashboards have improved a lot, which is the point, and provide more information and functionality, but the ’33 has all the basics like speedometer, gas gauge, battery, oil and temperature gauges and while I don’t stare at those gauges when I’m driving, I’m always checking them to see what is going on. So as virtual systems evolve and grow, the dashboards must also evolve to meet those needs. But the point is the same. Virtual infrastructure management provides you with today’s a dashboard to give you the true picture of your virtual and physical systems that you need to run your workloads. Given that new dashboard, you can covert more and more production applications onto shared infrastructure to drive down cost. For our average Akorri BalancePoint customer of 100 VMs, the ROI in reduced hardware costs for server and storage exceeds $300,000 annually and we easily triple the VM to admin ration.

The third reason is the clincher. How do we do more with what we have or “do more with less” as the management speak commonly refers to it. That needs a more comprehensive view of all the resources involved in all of the virtual machine I/O. Do I have enough storage capacity if I add more VM’s to the ESX server? How many VM’s can I add to optimally max out my servers and not introduce any performance problems to the applications on that server and the storage resources supporting the VM and which element of the data center resources is the problem when I’m trying to troubleshoot a difficult application I/O problem? When you walk into the meeting and the boss says, “Who knows how we leverage virtualization more?” or “Who can figure out why we are having problems managing what we just virtualized?” and you raise your hand and say, “Yes I do, I know how we can do all of that.” That’s when the boss is going to be ready to say – “YES.”

For information on how you can build your own compelling business case for virtual infrastructure management that typically shows a payback period of 2-4 months, download The Business Case for Virtualization Management: A New Approach to Meeting IT Goals.

My ’33 Chevy dashboard just won’t work in that New 2010 Chevy Camaro SS, although I wish I had one to try it out, or just to “test drive” it maybe.

October 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

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