Your How-To Guide To Server Virtualization

Joe Oster has good news and bad news for IT firms new to server virtualization. Oster is president and CEO of Structured Technologies Inc., a solution provider in Rochester, N.Y., that has been virtualizing client infrastructures for several years. How severe was the learning curve his company had to ascend? “It was pretty steep, but it was pretty short,” Oster says.

Other firms can expect the same, he adds. Virtualization poses new sales challenges and forces you to relearn almost everything you know about deploying and managing server hardware. But according to Oster and other virtualization experts, mastering the new technology needn’t be a painful or lengthy process, provided you do your homework and heed the advice of more experienced peers.

MAKING THE SALE
Good thing, too, because virtualization is slowly but surely catching on among SMBs. Though production deployments remain relatively rare today, adoption is set to expand dramatically over the next two years, according to data from Bostonbased Yankee Group Research Inc. And no wonder: By enabling a single physical server to host a series of autonomous “virtual machines,” each with its own operating system and application software, virtualization lowers hardware outlays and simplifies server provisioning, among other benefits. “There’s a long way to go, but in some form virtualization is going to be the default,” says Gary Chen, a senior analyst at Yankee Group. “It’s just going to be the way it is.”

For now, however, many SMB decision makers remain skeptical. “There are still a lot of naysayers out there,” observes Dave Spear, general manager and vice president of Virtual Technologies LLC, a virtualization integrator in Denver. Some IT managers find the unfamiliar new technology intimidating, he notes, while many business managers have trouble grasping what virtualization even is. Spear combats such resistance with barrages of customer success stories and third-party ROI studies. Other channel pros employ proof-ofconcept deployments too. “That lets us go out there, get some equipment spinning, and do some whiteboarding, so they can see how [virtualization] might work,” says Bill Cassidy, vice president of technology at Phoenix, Ariz.-based solution provider IT Partners.

Just be careful to set realistic expectations.
While it often boosts availability, for example, virtualization generally has little impact on system performance and may even slow some applications down slightly. Yet “a lot of partners out there are running around telling people that if you do virtualization things are going to run faster,” says Mike Strohl, president of Entisys Solutions Inc., an integrator based in Concord, Calif. The inevitable result is client disappointment, he adds.