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The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs 251

Posted by Zonk 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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The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs More

The Trouble with Virtualization - Cranky IT Staffs

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  • 34% on desktops? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:26PM (#21899036) Journal
    34% of surveyed companies have been running virtualized desktops? Putting aside that that number doesn't seem to square with the "Virtual Desktops a Hard Sell" table below, does that seem likely?!?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by pilgrim23 ( 716938 )
      As with many articles in that rag...the points it seems to make are all on the boss's hair. I am sure my lack of understanding comes from my lack of righ-sized, value added, synergy.
      • BINGO!

      • Re:34% on desktops? (Score:5, Funny)

        by OnlineAlias ( 828288 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:01PM (#21899618)
        On a go forward basis, you need step up to the plate and reach out to someone to get your thought processes in alignment. Perhaps a little thinking outside the box or brainstorming session would help to get someone to take ownership of this problem. Anyway, thanks for running this up the flagpole but lets take this conversation offline. I'll touch base with you later to discuss some of these basic action items.....

  • Backup problems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by r0BOT ( 1211902 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:29PM (#21899090)
    My companies biggest problem concerning virtualization at this point has been backing up running copies of virtual server without interruption, anyone have some insight on this?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by PowerEdge ( 648673 )
      Depends on the virtualization solution. Vmware has a product called Vmware consolidated backup. You can also load agents on the vms just like a physical server and back them up. You could also use things like mirroring and snapshotting to back them up at the storage layer. We used a combination of all 3 at my previous employ. Really depended on the virtualized box, what needed backing up, how often, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SlamMan ( 221834 )
      Don't overlook the low tech method of just running a backup client in the VM. Separately, make use SAN snapshots, and backup of those.

    • Re:Backup problems (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheRealFixer ( 552803 ) * on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:35PM (#21899196)
      On the VMware side, there's several options. VMware's Consolidated Backup [vmware.com] does exactly this. Also you can look at ESX Ranger [vizioncore.com].
    • If you can afford 5 minutes of downtime you can solve the problem by:
      • Use a host OS that has some type of shadow-copy mechanism.
      • Suspending the VM and spooling the memory out to a disk file. This should take a few minutes at most.
      • Shadow-copy all files that are normally used by the VM. This should take less than a minute.
      • Ressurrect your VM
      • Back up the image and all associated files including the associated memory spool file.

      It may be more practical to back up the system from within the VM, i.e. treat it as i

    • If you're running on Xen using Linux Volume Manager (LVM) logical volumes as your virtual block devices, you can just snapshot the logical volumes (LVs). If you have more than one LV for a given virtual machine, then you can do:

      1. Suspend the VM
      2. Make snapshots of the LVs
      3. Resume the VM
      4. Backup the snapshots
      5. Delete the snapshots
    • Virtual server 2005 R2 SP2 has a new feature that will use the host systems VSS Snapshots to take a snapshot of the running image in a way that can be backed up. However, it appears that only a few of the backup software providers work with it yet. So, like the previous post, you can always install the backup agent inside the VM, or use scripting to pause the VM, backup the big file, and then unpause it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rbanffy ( 584143 )
      The simplest solution is to run back-up software on the VM itself.

      Another very simple way is taking a snapshot of the running VM and backint that up.

  • Can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:30PM (#21899112) Homepage Journal
    Technology is continually changing. Those who adapt will be the most successful. Those who don't will eventually be pushed aside. Fighting over turf won't get you far in a corporate environment in the long term.

    • Fighting over turf won't get you far in a corporate environment in the long term.
      Nor will complacency and ceding to other's demands. Best to stick with social engineering and make people that want "your" turf to think it was their idea to move elsewhere :)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Fighting over turf won't get you far in a corporate environment in the long term.

      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.
      • Who said anything about playing nice? Or not fighting for what you want? Turf wars, specifically, get you nowhere because eventually your turf will change underneath you. Other things are worth fighting for.

      • 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.

        Choosing to be flexible is very different than "playing nice" as you say. But, since you brought it up, you'll find success much more obtainable if you generally "play nice" and choose your battles wisely. If you choose to have a difficult and inflexible attitude all the time, no one will pay any attention when you resist something that you really need to be resisting (kind of a 'boy who cried wolf' situation). In other words, if you come in the room already dialed up to "10", where can you go fr

    • Technology is continually changing. Those who adapt will be the most successful.

      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.
    • This is nothing new. The same nonsense occurs in the "converged" world where VoIP and data mesh. You have the Cisco-tards who want to rip out and replace an entire PBX infrastructure because they think it will protect their turf if they move to Cisco's Call Mangler platform, even though it's an entirely different set of challenges. On the other side are old timer PBX folks who refuse to learn anything new.

      From my experience however, it's relatively easier for a voice person to get quickly up to speed regard
      • I was actually going to post the exact same thing, though in my mind it's MUCH harder to get teams to work well together in a VoIP implementation, just because of the completely different worlds the teams come from. A lot of traditional telecom engineers are having a real tough time adapting right now, as their industry is getting thrust into world that they know very little about. People from the Data world are having challenges with VoIP, too. However, the telecom world is moving in their direction, wh

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by j-pimp ( 177072 )

        From my experience however, it's relatively easier for a voice person to get quickly up to speed regarding data than it is for a data person to learn voice.

        Because those voice people were once Netware engineers or AS/400 operators before there boss presented them with a "great opportunity."

    • but the reality is that if you're not responsible for something important, even mission critical, then you just let someone paint a layoff target on your back. that's the political reality of many companies. It's easier to fight to keep what you have than it is to expect that someone will give you something good to manage after you give up control over what you have right now. Virtualization is actually a poor example of the cross functional integration in many companies, since it's squabbling within th
      • But what's important or mission critical today might not be tomorrow. Rather than fighting to keep what you have it's better to adapt to other technologies and become a leader there. I'm not saying to sit back and relax, but move as the environment changes.

  • as a systems engineer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:31PM (#21899124) Journal
    In my experience as a systems engineer, the biggest problem we've had with virtualization is that too many people who don't understand it well view it as a magic wand that you can wave to make all your capacity & provisioning problems disappear.

    "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)

      by Cerberus7 ( 66071 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:40PM (#21899292)
      *facepalm* I sometimes forget how stupid people can be.

      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.

      • Re:as a systems engineer (Score:4, Funny)

        by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:04PM (#21899656) Journal
        Are you crazy, man! Every DNS, NTP, and DHCP server out there needs it's own quad core with 8GB RAM! Our departmental wiki needs a whole load balanced cluster.
        • Sadly I used to work with a guy who thought this way. It's almost like he used the number of servers he managed as a way to measure the size of his peni...intelligence.

        • Re:as a systems engineer (Score:5, Insightful)

          by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @04:28PM (#21900908) Homepage Journal
          "Are you crazy, man! Every DNS, NTP, and DHCP server out there needs it's own quad core with 8GB RAM! Our departmental wiki needs a whole load balanced cluster."

          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!!

        • Are you crazy, man! Every DNS, NTP, and DHCP server out there needs it's own quad core with 8GB RAM! Our departmental wiki needs a whole load balanced cluster.

          Ah, I remember my days in the Internet Pornography Retrieval, Testing And Evaluation Department with great fondness....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )
        Virtualization actually sucks for testing environments. It allows for
        management to engage in more of that "virtual servers are like magic
        fairy dust" nonsense and skimp on real physical resources. By divorcing
        them from the problem of having Sun ship them another physical server,
        management gets even further out of touch with operational problems.

        Test systems are bound to be underpowered anyways. Aggregating a number
        of them together just means that someone can hammer one of the virtual
        machines and bring them a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jandrese ( 485 )
          More importantly, Virtual Machines can actually hamper your testing depending on what you're doing. If you need precise (or even semi-precise) timing then a VMware box is a bad idea since their clocks tend to drift at an alarming rate and you have little control over at least one of the schedulers affecting your process.

          Of course sometimes you gotta make due. When your product is large and complex and only written for Linux, and the only thing you have to test with is a loaded down old creaky and unde
        • I think he was refering to more along the lines of running Windows 98, 2000, 2k3, XP, XP SP1, XPSP2 with IE6, XP SP2 with IE7 etc. For testing not a testing server that runs web apps.

          Thanks
          robert

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • . 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.

        Heh.

        A while back I worked at a very large IT consultancy. We were being asked to respond to an RFP for virtualizing (using commodity hardware and VMware) a truly massive number of systems, running services ranging from a departmental CVS box to enterprise Sun hardware running "several million lines" of Java code systems for fine tuning corporate promotions.

        N

        • Re:as a systems engineer (Score:4, Funny)

          by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @04:59PM (#21901424)
          lol. Shows you don't have what it takes to work at a consultancy...

          "We want you to virtualize this system. How much will it cost?"
          "Okay... um, what are the hardware specifications?"
          no, no no nonononono.

          "We want you to virtualize this system. How much will it cost?"
          "Okay... um, quite a small amount that, amortised over the duration of the contract and combined with our leading edge technical capacity and skill-based best-of-breed approaches to migration technologies will end up saving you significant sums compared to your current total cost of ownership. Oh, and there will be a small, tiny, insignificant, additional cost based upon actual usage of capacity going forward, nothing to worry about that last bit. really. honest."

      • What I've found to be a pain is when people start running testing environments with like 7 servers in bridge mode with static IP#'s in the DHCP pool because they don't know any better. Then IT trouble tickets come in asking why people are getting IP conflicts and interrupted SSH connections to SVN servers while no IT trouble-tickets come in from QA as their invalid network configuration changes are distracting them entirely with test results that are randomly terrible and they just can't seem to figure out
    • I owe you a beer. And you owe me a new keyboard =) It is now very Mountain Dewy.

  • I'd imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd imagine that one of the big problems with virtualization is clueless IT managers/staff who don't understand that you basically are dividing a server down into sub-servers. I've encountered a few people who seem to think that virtualization multiplies the server resources. That is, everyone using a VM basically gets the full specs of the host machine--all at once! Ugh! Maroons!
    • Actually, they do. In 10mS chunks, for compute-bound tasks - YMMV.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by blair1q ( 305137 )
        Actually, they don't. They do get the whole CPU for 10 ms, but the memory, swap, and disk are still shared among all the virtual subsystems. I'm not sure how devices are handled, but if the virtualization software allows them to continue handling requests started by one virtual machine while another takes its time slice on the CPU, they may not get control of those, either.
      • Not so for Memory and Disks, which are where the dumb managers come in.

  • Does this come as a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gybrwe666 ( 1007849 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:36PM (#21899214)
    My company works with several shops that are working on large-scale virtualization and common platform projects. I would say the biggest single issue is simply politics, because much of the initial work is affecting older platforms that are the biggest win technically and financially to replace. For instance, one shop has a significant investment in Alpha systems, and still has production servers that are 15+ years old running a huge chunk of their revenue producing systems. The folks working directly on the Alpha servers have considerable clout, since they've been the golden children for many, many years. Their bosses know how to play politics, and, considering that Alpha/VMS experience is one of those IT areas where there is little new blood from younger IT staff members, they are quite adept at finding reasons why it won't work to serve their own ends.

    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
    • As a youngster I was frusterated by the dinosours as well. Man, were they thick.

      On the other hand, there are many places where the Vax or Alpha/VMS servers are older than 15 years. Solid as a rock, and the companies would be morons to pull the plug.

      I have done a fair amount of work on OpenVMS with clients, and I don't see any platform that is more stable, and it really is well suited to some tasks. I consider AIX lighter weight than VMS, Linux even lighter... and I would never dream of putting anything m
      • But the problem isn't how reliable they are. The problem arises from the need to change their products and grow. Since HP will stop selling the Alpha in the future, they have a decision to make. Not only that, but when you are talking about hundreds of servers (that's after they decommissioned 300+ last year) support costs are a huge financial drain. And development costs are increasing as VMS coding skills get more and more rare and specialized. So, overall, they don't have much of a choice but to loo

  • Ha! (Score:2, Funny)

    by east coast ( 590680 )
    [Virtualization] also asks IT experts from different realms to work more closely together.

    Oh yes, there will be blood.

  • Resource Scheduling (Score:3, Informative)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:40PM (#21899282) Homepage
    How do you ensure that the VM supervisor fairly and efficiently allocates resources to the VMs? The mainframe people put a great deal of work into this area. One badly behaved VM shouldn't be able to degrade the performance of the other VMs.

    • Re:Resource Scheduling (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRealFixer ( 552803 ) * on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:48PM (#21899402)
      VMware has multiple ways to balance and protect resources. You can set hard limits on VM resource utilization, ensuring that one machine can never take over a certain percentage of CPU, memory and even network bandwidth. VMs can also be given "shares", which determine priority over resources. In a contention for resources, the VM with the highest number shares is given immediate access to what it needs, with the lower share VMs splitting what's left over. This is the recommended way to handle it, as it gives you the best overall hardware utilization across your entire implementation.

      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.

  • This is not a problem with virtualization (Score:4, Interesting)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:40PM (#21899288) Homepage Journal
    This is a problem with management and/or the IT staff.

    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.
  • At my job, we honestly don't have a valid reason to adopt virtualization right now. It'll actually cost us more money to accomplish the same job we're presently doing without it. But my boss wants to deploy it somehow only because it's one of the latest buzzwords. I guess it looks good to have some vm experience on my c.v. also ;-)

  • Well of course (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, well, naturally the problem is us "peons" can't work together. It has nothing to do with the fact that our bosses don't have a fucking clue about how to use the technology.

  • Skirts the problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by John Jamieson ( 890438 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @02:54PM (#21899514)
    The problem is not that we don't want to work together. It is that you often cede control when you virtualize. And most of us don't love giving up control.

    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: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      "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."
      That problem is actually pretty simple.
      1. Is the hardware you need available as a USB or firewire device? If so use that to add it for now.
      2. Migrate the none mission critical service to a different box. One of the great things about virtual servers is that you can move them pretty easily if need

    • Re:Skirts the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cerberus7 ( 66071 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:07PM (#21899698)
      Nobody should EVER virtualize a server that needs special hardware. EVER. Virtual servers should be reserved for the most generic of hardware requirements. Once you start bringing in fax boards you need a dedicated physical solution. If you want to test that kind of thing, go ahead and virtualize it, but the production box should be physical. I shudder to think of a virtualized firewall or router. Ouch.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rwyoder ( 759998 )

        I shudder to think of a virtualized firewall or router. Ouch.
        NetScreen firewalls have had virtualization capability for a long time. Cisco routers have virtualization via commands using the "vrf" parameter.

      • Re:Skirts the problem (Score:5, Funny)

        by blhack ( 921171 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:32PM (#21900062)
        But the IBM commercial told me that i could replace my entire datacenter with a single server! Are you telling me that those two youngish looking racially diverse guys having a conversation at a coffee shop about sloshing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware around even though neither of them really seems to be sure what all of it does were LYING TO ME!?
        • You probably could replace a decent little data center with a single server. It wouldn't be a tiny one, though. You ever seen those massive IBM mainframes? I mean the big ones. Yeah.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      That's just silly. Why would you put a physical fax card in your virtual server?

      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.
      • lol, the real world often appears silly.

        Why? because that was one of the legacy systems that you are consolidating for the large mortgage company(bank) that you just landed a contract at.
        They don't want to spend the time changing the elaborate back end they built around Rightfax. They just want the thousands of faxes each day to keep going out and coming in the same as always. (reengineering costs money, and they want to save it. Banks can be REAL cheap - just try to get the money to rewrite a working sy

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ender- ( 42944 )
      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.

      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
      • I was aware that ESX can move a running VM, I thought that VMotion was an extra licence, but that could idea be dated. I was not assuming that everyone would be running ESX. ESX was the only one that I had heard of that allows moving a running VM, but I don't try to track all the virtualization products. (of which x86 is just a portion)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cduffy ( 652 )
          Live migration is a pretty popular feature right now -- Xen has supported it pretty much forever at this point (assuming shared storage between your hosts -- but a SAN w/ GFS isn't all that hard thing to set up these days), and support went into KVM(!) early February '07.

          With it available in the Free systems, I don't see how anyone trying to sell commercial software in the field could do without it.

  • Windows on LINUX? Or LINUX on Windows? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:05PM (#21899672) Journal
    You want to watch a fight? Get the Windows Server sysadmins and the UNIX/LINUX sysadmins and ask each group which server OS should be the "Native" operating system under which the other runs....fun...

  • "when CIOs deploy a new technology" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lanner ( 107308 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:13PM (#21899782)
    "when CIOs deploy a new technology"

    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!"
  • For no readily apparent reason, my company started leasing Windows servers a decade or so ago instead of buying 'em outright. The good news is you have new hardware every three years. The bad news is you have to move everything.

    A couple years back they went virtualized with everything. Now lease-rolls are a piece of cake; shut off your virtual server, zone the SAN storage so the new box can see it, and fire it up on the new box. Poof.

    That said, I'm still glad I'm not a Windows admin here. Who leases servers

  • squabbling IT staff? time to kick some ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @03:22PM (#21899922)
    Just the same, political squabbles among IT staffers fighting for turf

    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

    • The database team - not unreasonable
    • the server team - it ran on their boxes
    • the storage team - they allocated the disk space
    • the network team - as the storage was NAS'd (bad idea!!!)
    • the backup/security team - or it wouldn't get backed up

    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.

    • This is the reason that I leave a company after it gets TOO Large. When you have that many layers to get anything done at the low levels you know that very little is done at the top. It turns into a game of "Well, I submitted the request for your new laptop. Must be tied up in red tape" and that's not worth anyones time except the people who lose money by having a budget that includes unexpected laptop costs that quarter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsstahl ( 812393 )
      Sort it out yourselves or you'll have to start learning chinese.

      Dammit! I just finished learning commercial Indian.
  • Our good friend, Mr. T., needs to pay them a visit [youtube.com] to talk about the DOs and DON'Ts of Virtualization...

    [not an endorsement for the advertised product--it's just ridiculously funny]

  • We've had the same issues with bladecenters and their integrated switches (LAN and SAN). The serverteam procures the bladecenters, and all the components inside. They then consider it their turf to manage the embedded switches. It turned into a political nightmare to wrest control of those switches away from them.

  • My biggest IT problem with virtual machines (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Thursday January 03, 2008 @04:07PM (#21900592)

    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.

  • It seems that 90% of the problems are not technical at all but social. Turf wars, pissing contests, narcissists, clueless managers, clueless software engineers who none the less insist they know it all, newbs who think reading a book on Rails means you owe them 70K a year, technical staff members who expect to be 'lead by the hand' when learning new technology etc.

    Is it me or does this seem to pervade IT more than other fields? And if so, why?
    • It pervades IT mostly, some because Cert's at one point were seen as being an expert, which of course really only means an expert at exam taking. IMHO, they're are so many "Paper Cert" individuals out their that they keep perpetuating the Myth, if they didn't, they would be out of a job rather quickly.
    • no, it applies to all sectors. The thing with IT though is that your boss doesn't know everything and expects you (and others) to honestly inform him, and that is more open to abuse than, say a bank, where the boss used to do your job pretty much the same way you're currently doing it now and knows when you're talking bull.

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