Virtual Cultures

4:00 PM -- Despite the obvious technology challenges associated with virtualization, a number of IT managers that I spoke to this week highlighted cultural issues as their major virtualization hurdle. (See Users Talk Virtual Tension.)

Worringly, users are struggling with both internal resistance and unrealistic expectations from within their organizations. Working out how to walk this tightrope will be key to successful virtual roll-out.

"The biggest challenge is acceptance and getting these people that are more used to traditional [technology] models to drink the Kool-Aid," says Dennis Robinson, technical infrastructure manager at Pennsylvania-based healthcare firm Gennex Services, which has just started to roll-out VMware's ESX Server software. (See VMware Unveils Upgrade.)

"There are technical people in the organization, application owners, that are nervous about it because it is so new," he adds. "They would prefer to not to move their systems over to a virtualized environment."

This issue has already derailed some users' virtualization efforts, according to StorageIO Group analyst Greg Schulz. "It's certainly a risk," he told Byte & Switch. "There are some [firms] that have tried virtualization and have backed away from it."It would appear that virtualization, as a relatively new technology, is going to take some explaining, particularly in less tech-savvy parts of the business. "It's a cutting edge technology -- the average person doesn't understand it well enough to be totally comfortable with it," explains Nicholas Biggerstaff, Unix systems administrator at the University of Missouri - Saint Louis.

Taking a cautious approach, however, could help solve this problem. The first pieces of Robinson's data center to be virtualized are "basic infrastructure" elements such as file and print servers. "The hope is that people who are nervous will see the benefits of going to a virtual system from a high-availability point of view," he says. "By the end of '07, we expect to virtualize 60 to 65 servers out of 150."

Dollar signs can also help. Jamie Orth, network manager at Citrus & Chemical Bank, and a member of the Tampa Area VMware User Group Citrus told Byte and Switch that a speedy ROI helped his firm sidestep the problem of internal resistance. "I was very lucky -- within my organization, we had a bunch of servers that had to be replaced," he said, explaining that this helped him recoup his investment almost immediately.

Without this window of opportunity, it would have been a different story. "If our infrastructure was not up for replacement, it would still have been about a year for ROI," says Orth. "I could see why there would be some skeptical people out there -- people don't like change and it is a change."

But at least one exec, an IT manager from a utility firm in the southwestern U.S, who asked not to be named, warns that end-users can also have unrealistic expectations about virtualization. When internal users find out how easy it is to provision a virtual server, this can cause a problem of demand, he says."People tend to be conservative with the budget costs of physical servers, but when you can deploy a [virtual] server in 30 minutes by copying a file on your SAN, the number of [virtualization] requests that you get increases," he explains.

"It calls for a different level of management," adds the IT manager, explaining that, initially, he complied with all requests. "We let it go for a while to increase the developer excitement."

"Once we had everybody interested, we made the [virtual machine] justification process more stringent," adds the exec. "If we think that there are applications that can share servers, we will suggest that."

Clearly, when it comes to virtualization, everyone's going to need a little re-acculturation.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch