Virtualization provides opportunities to reduce complexity, improve service levels to the business and lower capital and operating costs to provide and maintain IT infrastructure. Over the past five years many organizations have specifically deployed VMware infrastructure software on industry standard systems to significantly reduce their hardware, data center, and operational costs--many report 70-80% cost savings, and 3-6 month ROI periods--while achieving unexpected gains in operational flexibility, efficiency, and agility. To date over one million server workloads have been virtualized on this infrastructure.
90% of our customers are now rolling out this infrastructure for production usage, and over 25% of them standardized on a VMware environment for industry standard workloads. Today, our most successful customers run thousands of production application instances using VMware infrastructure and have found it to be a catalyst for implementing a true service-oriented IT model. Figure 1 below shows the extent to which some common business workloads are run on this infrastructure based on a customer survey we performed at the end of 2005. A more detailed profile is also presented in Appendix A.
Based on the experiences of our customers, implementing virtual infrastructure is completely doable and manageable. However, because virtualization is still a relatively new technology that can touch a broad set of IT stakeholders and processes, cultural resistance can stall or limit many deployments, particularly in larger enterprise organizations. Thus we recommend that IT managers proactively obtain a big picture understanding of the organizational charter, technical skills and processes that can maximize and accelerate the benefits of virtual infrastructure.
Purpose of this paper and target audience
The target audience for this paper is senior IT managers. The recommendations outlined here provide IT management with the most salient best practices and implementation strategies to get started and to accelerate a successful roll out of virtualization technology. These guidelines are based on experiences and best practices accumulated by many of our leading customers and partners.
We cover organizational charter, stakeholder buy-in strategies to ease the common non-technical resistance that can affect virtualization rollouts. We also highlight key areas of IT infrastructure and operations most impacted by virtualization. We include some actionable next steps and templates for how to build an effective virtualization support team, assess readiness of your organization to adopt virtualization, and scope initial projects to help ensure success and develop your organization’s capabilities for broader virtualization deployment.
This paper is intended as a starter guide and complements a broader set of literature that provides additional information required for virtual infrastructure technical design, project planning, scoping, and implementation. In addition, your organization may benefit from the shared experiences and knowledge of other VMware users. There is a vast ecosystem of VMware partners offering various assessments, as well as design and implementation services to help you get started.
Given the evolving state of the technology and best practices, VMware plans to release periodic updates to this white paper, and expand a structured bibliography of supporting, follow-on documents. Please send an e-mail to virtualize@vmware.com if you wish to receive these updates. Also, if you have significant virtualization deployment experience of your own and would like to contribute your suggestions or best practices for deploying virtualization across an enterprise, VMware would like to hear from you.
Understanding Key Success Factors
To achieve the benefits of virtualization beyond a tactical and isolated project-oriented deployment, it’s important to understand the key success factors and strategies that organizations should follow. Many of these address cultural and organizational challenges that may stall or slow down deployments. Other factors pertain to organizational and deployment strategies that IT managers have used to overcome the challenges to widescale adoption of virtualization.
Top-down sponsorship ensures success of virtualization implementation
As with any strategic IT initiative, top level management that fully endorses and champions any virtualization efforts in the enterprise ensures the appropriate levels of funding, staffing, and cooperation from all groups within the enterprise. This is particularly important for a technology such as virtualization, since it is horizontal and requires buy-in from multiple groups.
