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The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 02:22 PM
from the p-e-b-k-a-c dept.
from the p-e-b-k-a-c dept.
lgmac writes "A new survey on the results of Enterprise use of virtualization shows that the process is seeing wide and appreciative use. Technical hurdles are obviously the biggest problem facing corporate IT shops. Just the same, political squabbles among IT staffers fighting for turf after being forced to work together in new ways seems to be a going concern as well. 'Technical woes rank higher--to be expected when CIOs deploy a new technology such as virtualization. However, the politics pain many of you. Remember, virtualization not only asks people to cede some control over their physical server kingdoms, but also asks IT experts from different realms to work more closely together.'"
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34% on desktops? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:34% on desktops? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:34% on desktops? (Score:5, Funny)
- They said I'm allowed to troll at a reasonable volume.
- Now Milton, don't be greedy, let's pass along the karma and make sure everyone gets a piece.
- Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for an overlords joke, and they brought me an in soviet russia joke.....and I said no trolling, NO trolling for the replies, but it lots of trolls, big stupid trolls
- Oh, and remember: next Friday... is MS bashing shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear an MS bashing shirt and jeans.
- I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "social engineering" in a dictionary.
- Just remember, if you hang in there long enough, good things can happen in this world. I mean, look at me.
- Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.
Parent
Backup problems (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Backup problems (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Can you afford 5 minutes of downtime? (Score:3, Informative)
It may be more practical to back up the system from within the VM, i.e. treat it as i
Can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wrong. In most corporate environments, that is precisely how you get ahead. Playing "nice" ensures that you will always be the underling. Why? Because you are so easy to get along with, anyone can task and work with you. This can and does keep people from getting promoted.
If you want it, you better fight for it. If you don't, it will be taken away by someone else who did. End of story.
Re: (Score:2)
And one of these days someone will teach this lesson to the RIAA right? Or is it that when things work a certain way and do so correctly (Like an AS400 Machine) they are reluctant to change and disrupt production.
Re: (Score:2)
From my experience however, it's relatively easier for a voice person to get quickly up to speed regard
as a systems engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hey! We need a new server to run Blah version 3.0!"
"No problem! Sammy can create a new virtual server!"
"Oh wait - my bad. We actually need a whole farm."
"That's okay, he can whip up a whole batch of them!"
Ad nauseaum. About the worst I've heard was a clueless manager asking me if the resource requirements for Oracle 10g could be relaxed because we were running it on VMware. I actually found myself calling a "come to Jesus" meeting in which I explained, in as simple terms as I could, that "making the system virtual" doesn't mean that hardware requirements go away. Very, very few applications get faster when you put them on equivalent hardware, only virtualized.
Re:as a systems engineer (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, what I've found to work great with virtualization is consolidating all the dozens of little low-load servers. It helps with power consumption and heat output, as well as hardware costs. For a major company-wide high-load system, virtualization is absolutely not what I would be looking at. It's also fantastic for testing environments.
Parent
Re:as a systems engineer (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:as a systems engineer (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, it often isn't a bad idea to ask for the moon when you can order hardware. Often, you get less....then I've seen SO many times, where a dev/testing box....turns INTO the production server.
Not to mention other new projects that come in, with no budget for hardware....and you have to squeeze multiple things onto boxes that you do have.
If you can get a quad core with 8G ram....often, I say go for it!!
Parent
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Re:as a systems engineer (Score:4, Funny)
"Okay... um, what are the hardware specifications?"
Parent
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I'd imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Does this come as a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but virtualization will result in lost jobs at some point. Many IT staffers are afraid, whether rightly or wrongly, of losing their jobs. In a sense, they are outsourcing a good chunk of their day-to-day duties. I remember when this particular company went to SAN's over the last half-decade, and you would have thought, from the way the Alpha guys were fighting it, that the world was ending. They created road-block after road-block about how they wouldn't be able to keep the systems running, how it wouldn't work in "their" environment, etc, etc.
And, because of the compartmentalization that often occurs in large enterprise, many of these guys have very little idea about anything outside their own box. I know guys who have architected corporate platform migrations who are so narrow in their focus that they have *NO* experience outside their box, be it a particular OS, a server type, a network type, whatever. When the box becomes a cloud of equipment, they are lost and often have little or no ability to work with the other layers involved. Learning new troubleshooting skills in these environments is a painstaking process, and not one that many people are comfortable with.
In the end, these various factors are creating far larger artificial roadblocks for implementing virtualization than any technical challenges. To top it off, much of this is being driven by financials. The CFO and CTO are desparately trying to find ways to cut costs. By the time this message percolates down to the workers, they feel threatened rather than empowered, and have little incentive (and generally no training, either) to be complicit in what they feel is a threat.
Bill
Ha! (Score:2, Funny)
Oh yes, there will be blood.
Resource Scheduling (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Resource Scheduling (Score:5, Informative)
Starting in VI3, VMware also introduced the ability for VMs to migrate automatically across an entire farm of hosts, based on server load. In my experience, with very little tweaking, VMware does a very good job of fairly balancing resources.
Parent
This is not a problem with virtualization (Score:4, Interesting)
Management should run the company in a way that cooperation is rewarded not punished. Consolidation to save money shouldn't result in harm to those who are making it happen or anyone else for that matter.
The IT staff as well as all of the other employees and officers should have the attitude that if it's good for the company and not bad for anyone else it's the right thing to do.
Must have a valid need for virtualization first (Score:2)
Well of course (Score:2, Insightful)
Skirts the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
With virtualization in some Corp's, you have to ask for another of the 32 processors, instead of just having the headroom all the time.(work that one through a buricratic organization, it can take months)
Say you have a need to add another fax board(or whatever) to the virtualized x86 server, to find that they stuck some mission critical Virtual Environment on the Server and It CAN'T come down for another 2 weeks.
Yep, it saves hardware, but multiplies headaches in some situations. It is no wonder some fear it.
Re:Skirts the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:Skirts the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Virtualize the fax card with iaxmodem, run it over a TCP connection to a serial port on a separate box, use t38modem with the other endpoint on a dedicated piece of Cisco hardware... there are plenty of other options.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Aside from another poster's excellent point about not virtualizing servers that require specialized hardware, you're missing another point of the virtualized servers.
In the case of VMWare ESX server, you'd use VMotion to solve this problem. Say you have a cluster of 3 or 4 physical servers running s
Windows on LINUX? Or LINUX on Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Windows on LINUX? Or LINUX on Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html [vmware.com]
Have a great day!
Tim
Parent
Re:Windows on LINUX? Or LINUX on Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Get a hypervisor that doesn't suck so bad it needs another OS to run, and your windows and linux guys will get along much better.
"when CIOs deploy a new technology" (Score:3, Insightful)
That could be your problem right there. When a specific technology or whoop-do-doo product is pushed from the top down, rather than the bottom up, it's a problem. That's not the same as management saying "Get this done", so much as it's "Use this fancy thingy I read about in the newspaper... who cares what it does or if there is something better, I'm the decider!"
squabbling IT staff? time to kick some ass (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a classic sign of a broken IT department. One place I worked, if you (well, if I) needed to increase the size of a database table, I had to get sign-offs from
net result? nothing ever got agreed. The simplest changes took forever and cost a fortune. The operation is now outsourced.
Who's to blame? Probably not the techies, they just pressed buttons. Quite likely the team-leaders for turning it political, definitely the IT managers who allowed the situation to continue.
Who kept their jobs?
yup, the managers! You've been warned: infighting only hurts the foot-soldiers, the generals aren't affected. Sort it out yourselves or you'll have to start learning chinese.
My biggest IT problem with virtual machines (Score:3, Interesting)
It's happened twice to me at two different companies.
Whenever I need a machine scratch-pad, I boot up a VMWare machine. Test the software or do whatever I need to do and delete it. But while it's running, it broadcasts itself on the local net. Admins really freak out when a machine named //FAKEOUT or //BOGUS suddenly shows up on their net.
I've given two different IT guys at two different companies cardiac events over it.
Sorry, fellas.
Re: (Score:2)
Companies are using virtualization as an excuse to do the kind of reorganization they should have done a couple of years ago. But, yes, make sure you're in charge of what pie remai
Virtual Server != Less Staff (Score:5, Insightful)
Many large virtualized deployments include very advanced technologies such as shared SANs, shared infrastructure, and complex virtualization tools.
Frankly, I would argue that you are probably just redeploying people resources into different roles and responsibilities, while probably saving on hardware and energy costs for the infrastructure through consolidation.
Parent
You win the golden marble (Score:5, Interesting)
We recently moved everything into virtua-land, complete with a hige SAN, fiberchannel switches, blade servers - the whole nine yards.
While I do think the move was a net positive, the complication of 60 physical servers was more or less replaced by the complication of all the new SAN/Bladecenter components and their interdependency.
One particular thing we've run into is "firmware hell", where you have several components in the chain that all require firmware updates and all depend on each other.
Parent
The C student effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:Yes, i'm cranky - here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're doing something stupid like putting clusters or redundant servers on the same virtualization host, then I would agree. High availability loses it's meaning if all your nodes have a single point of failure.
However, there's absolutely no reason you can't make your virtualization implementation highly available itself. Right now, I have clusters running in VMware VI3, that are running on separate hosts. Even with DRS, which balances all your VMs across an entire pool of servers, I can ensure that redundant servers and clusters don't end up running on the same piece of physical hardware. And when you add HA into the mix, you also provide a level of high availability to systems that you might not otherwise have been able to justify the expense on.
Parent