The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs 251
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.'"
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
Well of course (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can't we all just get along? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
The C student effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Skirts the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"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!"
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Backup problems (Score:2, Insightful)
Tim
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!!
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.