The 'new normal' makes cloud mandatory, not optional.

Today I was published in one of the top cloud computing journals. In fact, it is the Cloud Computing Journal, part of the SYS-CON stable and the same organization that runs the excellent Cloud Expo events. The article is called “Eleven Tips for Successful Cloud Computing Adoption“:

Key issues can make or break an organization’s strategic cloud adoption. The intersection of cloud computing with business strategy, Big Data, vendor lock-in, globalization, collaboration, security, licensing, virtualization, confidence, and the ‘new normal’ can act as huge points of concern. So I put down some thoughts on this, and ended up – in no particular order – with the following 11 tips for the successful adoption of cloud computing:

Please read the whole article at the Cloud Computing Journal.

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So what do you reckon? Are these tips useful for you? What tips did I miss? I would love to see your comments at Cloud Computing Jounal, in my comments section below, or as always on Twitter.

Thanks to CRN for the chance to speak with you!

I was interviewed for a great article published today in CRN titled, “CA Putting Cloud Pieces Together”. In it, Jack McCarthy writes:

CA Technologies has turned heads in the last two years with acquisitions of a string of cloud-based companies, marking its intention to be a major cloud player and cloud partner. Now CA is leveraging those deals to step up as a full-fledged cloud services provider, offering products, services and partnerships to help business move to the cloud through a variety of software lifecycle management and automation services.

Some partners are impressed, but say it may take CA a while longer to fully integrate its cloud services plan.

But CA nonetheless is confident it’s on the right track. “The core of our strategy is to help customers use the cloud to build a public or private or hybrid cloud, whether using our services or providing their own services,” Andi Mann, CA’s vice president of Strategic Solutions, said in an interview Monday.

Please read the whole article online here.

I have a new blog post up now at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies on the 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Service …

There is a persistent (mainly vendor-driven) meme going around the world of IT that building and running a responsible, secure, available, enterprise-quality cloud is simple. The theory seems to be that it just needs some server virtualization, adding automation, maybe dropping in some change control, and calling it done. Or that all you need to do is to log on to a public cloud provider, give them a credit card number, then click a button to migrate your workloads to the cloud.

(read the whole blog – 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Services at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies)

Logicalis Cloud In a Box!

While travelling back from VMworld EMEA last week, I stopped at London and visited with a fantastic CA Technologies customer and partner, Logicalis UK. Logicalis UK is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, part of a group that employs over 2,000 people worldwide, with annualized revenues in excess of $1 billion.

Logicalis is doing some amazing things to deliver both public and private hosted cloud using CA Technologies, alongside key strategic partners Cisco and NetApp. While visiting their site in the UK – just outside of London, I learned a lot about the real world of cloud service providers.

The top 10 things I learned about cloud from my visit to Logicalis UK were:

1. Cloudbursting is real & it is happening today

There is a lot of hubbub over whether or not cloudbursting – “the ability to shift an application from a private cloud into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes” – is actually achievable in the real world. Well, I have seen it, and it is real. Logicalis does it today with incredible efficiency, as close to real-time as most mission-critical enterprise applications would realistically need.

2. Cloud in a box is real & exists today – literally

With the unique capabilities of Cisco UCS and NetApp storage, alongside CA Technologies automation and a lot of their own special sauce, Logicalis has literally put a cloud in a box. Wanna see it? Here it is! They have also solved a range of portability and security issues with some very clever solutions, even including the perennial “but what about administrators’ physical access in a public cloud?” dilemma. And they make it look sexy as hell!

3. Expert partners make CA Automation Suite amazing

CA Technologies alone could not have made this unique solution happen without Logicalis – or vice-versa. Nor could we have made this solution work without other great partners, like Cisco and NetApp. Great partnerships like this bring people, process, and technology together to create unique and valuable solutions that are more than the sum of their parts – which is exactly what Logicalis delivers to its customers.

4. Cost savings from cloud can get real, fast

How about two and a half million pounds (~= $3.8m USD) in savings? Is that real enough for you? Logicalis has the numbers, but bottom line: if you avoid building a new data center, or reuse existing office (or classroom, warehouse, cupboard) space instead of dedicated conditioned raised floor space, then the savings can be – and for Logicalis’ customers, are – substantial.

5. You don’t need server virtualization to do cloud

In the aftermath of the VMworld hype a lot of people are equating virtualization with cloud. VMware has a great cloud platform, which Logicalis and CA both support, but Logicalis and CA also deliver cloud services on a range of alternative virtual platforms (including Hyper-V and Xen), and even on bare metal x86 servers (as CA Labs on Demand has been doing in our own private cloud for years). And not just x86, because, as I have learned …

6. You can find public cloud providers that go beyond commodity x86

It is easy to find a public x86 cloud for Linux/Windows workloads; but the options for mission-critical UNIX servers are few and far between. CA’s Labs on Demand provided automated self-service for UNIX for private cloud, and soon Logicalis will be providing UNIX support in their public and on-premise hosted private cloud too, using the UNIX support in CA Automation Suite. There is more special sauce here, but UNIX support is no longer the roadblock to cloud it has been in the past.

7. You can run restrictively licensed apps in the cloud

Again, Logicalis brings some special sauce to migrate even software from large, intractable OS and application vendors from server to server, and even site to site, without license issues or roadblocks. If you have license issues today with cloud, you should talk to Logicalis about how they solved them. Crazy cool!

8. Great things happen when you combine great solutions

Logicalis is not just a CA automation customer, but combines the power of integrating CA Automation Suite for Clouds with CA Spectrum, CA eHealth, and CA ecoSoftware to deliver an incredible solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Alongside Cisco UCS  and NetApp storage, this adds up to a mission-critical, enterprise-grade cloud solution that is unique, differentiated, and truly remarkable.

9. Cloud does indeed make for amazing Disaster Recovery

Logicalis is providing site-to-site replication that automatically detects system failures and replicates the failing environment to a public cloud infrastructure, though not instantaneous, certainly faster than it takes to go grab a coffee. The demonstration of this is amazingly powerful, which leads me to my last learning…

10. Hitting a big red ‘power-kill’ switch still freaks me out a little

Part of the DR demo the Logicalis crew gave me simulated an emergency outage by inviting me to hit this big red kill switch – as seen in data centers everywhere. When I did, I immediately heard the sickening (lack of) sound as the cloud-in-a-box died mid-process. After working in data centers for over 10 years, that sudden silence still gives me a visceral reaction. Much credit to the Cisco and NetApp hardware though – Logicalis has done this hundreds of times, and the box is still running smoothly.

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Overall, it was a fantastic site visit for me. Logicalis UK is doing amazing things with CA Technologies and great partners like Cisco and NetApp. Their people were friendly, smart, and highly qualified. Their processes are sophisticated, proven, and automated.

The way they combine these critical elements of people, process, and technology to deliver unique and valuable solutions is an incredible revelation. Make sure to check them out.

This blog was originally published at the CA Technologies Cloud Storm Chasers blog.

I had a great time at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas this year. As I predicted in my last blog post, I met with loads of amazing people – too many to list out here, let alone in 140 on Twitter! I also saw some great technology in the solutions exchange, dropped in on some fascinating sessions, and of course enjoyed some excellent meals, drinks, and parties!

I was also very pleased to present on Extending the Value of Your VMware Solutions to Design, Deliver and Maintain Reliable, Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud Services. I certainly was not there to ‘pitch’ any CA Technologies products or solutions (after all, I know that no one wants a sales pitch at a tradeshow like VMworld). Instead, I tried to provide strategic advice to the audience on how to look at their migration to cloud, and especially how to extend VMware’s excellent virtualization and cloud technologies.

My VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Presentation Agenda

With a smattering of additional tips and content from ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps’, I talked about:

• how to match services with the right cloud using project and portfolio analysis based on models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment
• how to think about your service portfolio, whether considering migrating existing services to a private VMware cloud, building new services on a public VMware cloud, dealing with business users who buy into 3^rd-party cloud themselves, or even services that you may never migrate to the cloud
• how to leverage VMware to deliver both evolutionary cloud models built with virtualization, optimization, automation, orchestration, and dynamic IT; and with revolutionary models that deliver exponential benefits with a virtual business service, built on a virtual service fabric
• how to integrate complex service workflows, skillsets, and technologies, as well as incorporating NIST best practices including cloud service management and service-aware end-to-end application assurance to continually improve service quality, predictability, and costs
• how to apply critical security disciplines including Identity Management & Provisioning, Identity Federation & Single Sign-On, Web Access Management, Privileged User Management, Identity Compliance, and User activity reporting, whether to, from or for the cloud
• how to approach cloud as a transformation opportunity, so you don’t just do the same things in different ways, but fundamentally transform business and IT, delivering a ‘cloud of clouds’ with a broad technology ecosystem stocked with key VMware partners (like CA Technologies!)

You can check out my slides at the CA.com communities site, or over at SlideShare.

Overall, my session seemed to be very well received. A lot of people came up to me there and afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed my presentation, and how useful it was for them. I also enjoyed a great set of questions from the attendees immediately after the session. In fact, we were chatting so much we had to be ushered out so the next session could start.

Immediately afterwards I headed down to the CA Technologies booth, and really enjoyed talking with various practitioners and others at the book signing for ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps‘ afterwards (with co-authors Jeanne Morain and Kurt Milne). I even had a professor in IT from NYU ask for a copy of my book! Cool!

All in all, I had a great time, made new friends, enjoyed great food, and even managed to avoid the possible downsides of VMworld!

I hope VMware Europe Copenhagen will be just as good – and I hope to see you there!

Coming to VMworld 2011? Let me know so we can connect!

In my last post, I asked why you love going to VMworld, and gave you a few of my reasons – like the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, and the parties.

But like any business trip, it is not all fun and games, beer and skittles, rainbows and unicorns.

So why do you *not* like going to VMworld?

Like my last post, I’ll go first. Here are some things I really do *not* love about going to VMworld – as well as some upsides to take the sting off :

• Las Vegas – Moscone at San Francisco was great, but I have been to Vegas so much now that I am getting tired of it.
  • Upside: if it has to be in Vegas, I think the Venetian is the best venue in town, with the best casual dining on the strip.

• Copenhagen – Copenhagen is really expensive and hard to get to from the US, and the Bella Center is so far out of town, away from most hotels, with barely anything nearby.
  • Upside: Copenhagen really is a beautiful city, and if you have a spare day you can visit the fabulous Louisiana nearby.

• The internet access – WiFi (and 3G) at VMworld is always over-subscribed and under-provisioned, though this is not surprising for such a large event. Especially in Vegas, where the casinos don’t want you to do anything except eat, drink, and gamble, I don’t expect the Venetian to be any better than Moscone last year.
  • Upside: it is a great excuse not to answer that email/IM/DM from your boss!
• The conference food – let’s face it, conference food is rarely gourmet, and VMworld is no different. In their defense, when you are serving 15,000+ people you will never get Tetsuya’s, Moto, or Le Gavroche.
  • Upside: both Vegas and Copenhagen have some great food – albeit outside the conference – including what is currently considered the best restaurant in the world.
• The VMworld website – well, the less said about that the better. Suffice to say, it frustrated me so much this year that I spent an afternoon redoing the EMEA hotel listings in a usable format.
  • Upside: once you have registered and scheduled your sessions, you really don’t need the website anymore.
• The hangover(s) – I love the parties, but not the hangovers. So be careful what, how much, how early, and how late you drink. I try to alternate hard drinks with soft drinks  so I can stay longer and suffer less (my regular is vodka & lime; my change-up is lime and soda) . It keeps me hydrated and  you can’t even tell it is non-alcoholic.
  • Upside: a hangover means you probably had a great night at a great party with some great people.
• The main party – I know loads of people loved them, but aged rockers Foreigner (with just one original member) were not my bag. And having seen INXS live at Sydney pubs (like the famous Manly Vale) in the 80s, why would I want to see them old and busted with no Michael Hutchence?
  • Upside: This year The Killers are playing the party – at least they have had a chart hit this millennium!

But really, while I can complain about all these little things, in the end they do not really matter. I still love going to VMworld

That said – what do you *not* love about going to VMworld?

Coming to VMworld 2011? Let me know so we can connect!

I love going to VMworld. It may be my favorite conference of the year (after CA World, of course!).

If you love going to VMworld too, then I would really like to know why.

I’ll start …

For me, the best part of going to VMworld is the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, the parties, and the buzz:

• I meet great friends, colleagues, customers, analysts, tweeps, and journalists who I hardly see during the year – even though I never seem to have enough time to see everyone I want to!
• The labs are reportedly excellent, and it is hard to beat them for in-depth hands-on training. I’m hoping to finally attend these myself this year, if only I can find the time!
• There are always interesting announcements, whether from VMware or their partners (like CA) with a load of cool new tools. I can’t wait for the keynotes!
• The Solutions Exchange is always amazing. Every year it gets bigger, with even more cool new tech. As an übergeek, I totally love it, and typically spend hours just wandering the booths!
• The SWAG from VMware and the Solutions Exchange vendors is always neat. It is fun to see what are ‘the cool tchotchkes’ every year, and the fun games, contests, and things to do on the booths make it feel like a fun fair!
• The parties – oh my goodness, the parties! I never get to all of them (my competitors don’t invite me as much as when I was an analyst ), but especially this year in Vegas, the parties should be a lot of fun.
• There are always loads of great sessions, if I can get to them between meetings. I learn so much every year, and this VMworld should be no different.

Speaking of the sessions, I am really excited to be speaking again this year. In Las Vegas I am presenting  ‘Extending the value of  VMware solutions: How to design, deliver, and maintain reliable, mission-critical virtualization and cloud services‘ (session SPO3974).

I think this will be a really useful session, where I will explain how you can leverage your investment in great foundational technologies from VMware to design, deliver, and maintain mission-critical virtual and cloud services, including how to smooth your evolution and revolution to private, public, and hybrid cloud, with key excerpts from my book, ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps‘. Please book SPO3974 into your online schedule builder for Wednesday, August 31 at 10:00 a.m. PT. I would love to see you there!

Plus, please don’t miss a couple of my CA Technologies colleagues speaking too:

• The Agony and the Ecstasy: Two Days in the Life of a CIO – Karen Sage, our vice president of Alliance Solutions, will present this Super Session on Monday, August 29 at 2:00 p.m. PT. Karen has incredible experience and insight into the world of the IT executive, and will discuss how converged cloud computing infrastructure is radically reshaping how organizations will use technology to increase innovation and improve business agility.
• Avoid Virtual Stall with Linked Clones – Allan Andersen, vice president of Product Management, will present this breakout session on Thursday, September 1 at 10:30 a.m. PT. Alan is a fascinating guy and really smart, and will explain how to extend VMware View Linked Clones to reduce storage costs, simplify management, and overcome virtual desktop stall, plus how other enterprise management technologies are critical for the success of VMware View deployments.

Also, CA Technologies will be giving away a limited number of free copies of ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud‘ at the CA Technologies booth (#439) in the Solutions Exchange. They will be there every day, so you can pick them up and have a chat with the great people on the CA booth. You might catch me there too, in between meetings. Even better, come along on Wednesday, August 31 at 11:15 a.m. PT (right after my session), when all three authors ‘of Visible Ops – Private Cloud‘ – Jeanne Morain, Kurt Milne, and myself – will be there to give away and sign copies too!

So if you are going to VMworld, let me know. I would love to connect, maybe hit a party or two together!

And let me know why you love going to VMworld too!

VMworld EMEA 2011 Hotels

I have to say, I really have not enjoyed using the VMworld 2011 website. For VMworld US I managed, but when it came to booking a hotel for VMworld EMEA, I was totally floored.

Booking through the VMworld website, I was presented with a list of 39 (yes, 39!) different hotels, each with an address, a price, a pop-up description, and a link to an individual PDF (yes, PDF, and yes, 39 of them) with more details on each hotel.

That meant wading through 39 individual PDFs, opening 39 map pages (in Bing Maps, no less),  and trying to sort out where they are and what they cost. Ugh!!

Well, what sort of übergeek would I be if I let that slide?

So, I did a slow-and-dirty Extract/Transform/Load (ETL), and mapped the addresses into a great mapping tool called batchgeo. This is a really fantastic (cloud-based) tool using the Google Maps API and other great open tech awesomesauce.

Check it out below or directly at at this link. You can also download the Excel spreadsheet I created to do the mapping from this link.

Hopefully this will help you deal with this a lot more easily. Maybe VMware can do this for use next year (hint hint!!)?

How does open cloud stack up on price?

After Australia’s Melbourne IT unceremoniously dumped VMware vCloud Express, I wondered whether proprietary offerings like vCloud Express can provide the margin to compete with equivalent open source cloud offerings (e.g. based on Xen or KVM).

I am not alone either. Respected analyst Dale Vile (co-founder of Freeform Dynamics) posed similar questions on Twitter.

In response, one VMware employee posted a Virtacore vCloud Express price list and asserted that vCloud Express pricing is “very competitive with any cloud” and that the cost of proprietary cloud was a “non-issue”.

However, it turns out that the ‘non-issue’ status of vCloud Express pricing is far from universal, even within VMware. At the recent Cloud Expo event (my roundup and slides for my three sessions are here), another VMware employee seemed to think it an issue worth addressing, as he chose to highlight the same pricelist in his presentation as ‘proof’ that proprietary cloud was actually more cost effective than a public cloud offering.

Moreover, one pricelist in isolation says nothing about competitive pricing; rather it simply demands comparison.

So spurred on by this broad concern and spirited commentary, I decided to compare the published list prices of multiple proprietary offerings (including the now-defunct Melbourne IT vCloud Express price list) with roughly equivalent offerings (based on open source Xen) from Amazon and Rackspace.
This turned up some confusing results that, for the most part, do not seem to support the VMware position. For example:

• No proprietary offering comes close to matching the price of the cheapest open offering, AWS’s ‘Free Tier’
• Melbourne IT’s cheapest offering was over twice as expensive as the lowest paid-for offering from Amazon, which offers the same CPU, but four times the RAM
• Melbourne IT’s cheapest offering was almost five times the cost of the cheapest Rackspace service, which offers (up to) four times the CPU power, albeit only half the RAM
• Every one of Amazon’s offerings are cheaper than proprietary equivalents, except for the 4 CPU, 2 GB server service
• Every one of Rackspace’s offerings are cheaper than proprietary equivalents, except for the (up to) 4 CPU, 16 GB server service
• For a relatively standard server (1 CPU, 2Gb RAM), Amazon is half the cost of Melbourne IT, and two-thirds the cost of the other equivalent proprietary offerings
• For a high-powered server (4CPU, 8Gb), an open offering from Rackspace is around the same price as two of the three equivalent proprietary offerings
• At the most expensive price point ($0.96/hr), a proprietary offering beats Rackspace for the same memory while providing twice the CPU, but is still more expensive than an equivalent Amazon service ($0.68/hr)

Perhaps this helps to explain why the CTO of Melbourne IT, Glenn Gore, is reported as saying “the market for [SMB] customers was already dominated by large scale American offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace”.

Of course, list price should never be the sole factor in deciding the value of a cloud service. Many other factors should come into play, including reliability, security, manageability, uptime, integration, portability, support, and much more. Nor is this a clear apples-to-apples comparison. Each service has differences in specific offerings, few services compare equally head-to-head, and each provider has different cost structures for bandwidth and storage. Amazon and Rackspace in particular obfuscate the CPU basis for their offerings, making any comparison difficult at best, flawed at worst.

In the interest of open discussion then, I have included my full data set below, along with some additional explanatory pricing notes and links to the original sources. Maybe I have interpreted some of the sources incorrectly. Maybe there are additional values I have not accommodated. Most notably, my conversion of Amazon’s “Compute Units” or Rackspace’s variable CPU allocations may be flawed (they do not make it easy). While I think this data does enable a valid comparison, in the end it is just my interpretation of some very dissimilar price lists.

I would love to know what you think. Can a proprietary cloud offering compete on price with an offering based on open source? It appears to me that this is the exception, rather than the rule, but VMWare keep insisting that it is true.

So what am I missing?

Please post any comments and corrections below – I would love to figure this one out.

Pricing Notes

Melbourne IT

• As noted, Melbourne IT is no longer offering a vCloud Express service
• Storage is additional $0.327 Per GB per month
• Bandwidth is additional $1.047 per GB
• Prices are all in AUD. At current exchange rate these prices are slightly higher in USD

Source:

http://vcloudexpress.melbourneit.com.au/

Virtacore

• Unused instances are charged at full rate, even if unused, unless ‘destroyed’
• Bandwidth is free up to 3TB, although the time period for this limit is not clear
• All plans include 50 GB Disk
• Plans are actually listed as providing ‘VCPU’

Source:

http://www.virtacore.com/vcloud_pricing.cfm

Terremark

• System Storage $0.25/month per GB (billed with virtual machine)
• Internet Bandwidth $0.17 per transferred GB
• Public IP Addresses $0.01/hour per IP
• Internet Services $0.01/hour per service
• 8 VCPU also available

Source:

http://vcloudexpress.terremark.com/pricing.aspx

Hosting.com

• System Storage $0.50/month per GB (billed monthly)
• Bandwidth $0.17/GB (billed hourly)
• It is unclear if Hosting.com continues to offer vCloud Express. The vCloud Express web page does not appear to be accessible by navigating the menu system (only options are ‘Enterprise’, ‘Dedicated’, and ‘Private’), and the service is still classed only as ‘beta’, but the page can be found by searching the website.

Source:

http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services/cloud/vcloud-express

Amazon Web Services (EC2)

• AWS actually leases by EC2 Compute Units (virtual cores with 1 or 2 ‘Compute Units’, each providing “equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor”). I have converted these at a 1:1 ratio, but this obfuscation does make it difficult to compare on even footing with other providers.
• All data transfer in – $0.100 per GB; Data Transfer out – First 1 GB / month free, and a reducing scale after that at an average of $1.07 per GB / month
• Offerings listed as 0.5 GB RAM actually provide 613MB, not 512MB; Offerings listed as 2GB RAM actually provide 1.7GB RAM; Offerings listed as 8GB RAM actually provide 7.5GB RAM; Offerings listed as 16GB RAM actually provide 15GB RAM. These have been rounded for ease of comparison.
• Free Tier is only available for 12 months for new customers

Sources:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Rackspace

• Bandwidth costs: Out 18¢ / GB; In 8¢ / GB
• Rackspace’s CPU allocation methodology is not transparent, and may not be as interpreted. For Linux distributions, it appears to offer up to four virtual CPUs for every Rackspace Cloud Server. However, CPU measurement is based on a non-standard and dynamic weighting that is far from clear. This makes it difficult to compare 1:1 with other providers, even after consulting with Rackspace support.

Sources:

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/technology/

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

Mike Laverick's RTFM Education

I recently had the great pleasure of recording a ‘Chinwag’ on RTFM Education hosted by the inestimable Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick). Mike is a consummate pro with a comprehensive understanding of virtualization, so it was a privilege and a joy to record this video chat with him.

Andi and I covered a wide range of questions – and we simple didn’t have enough time to cover every topic. These are the questions we DID manage to get through in our time!

Q1. Folks used to talk about VM Sprawl, now their talking about VM stall. What is VM Stall, and what causes it?

Q2. I see you took a side swipe at the “the software mainframe” analogy for virtualization – go on let rip!

Q3. So you have just published a new book on virtualization and private cloud – what is that all about?

Q4. There’s a lot of talk on both sides about whether or not ITIL can coexist with virtualization and cloud. What is your take on that?

You can see/download  the whole Chinwag (on video or audio-only) here – Chinwag with Mike.

The author, Andi Mann (left), speaking with Roger Green of CIOZone.com during VMworld 2010

At VMworld 2010, I had the great pleasure to record a video interview with Roger Green, Executive Editor at CIOZone.com. We chatted for about 20 minutes in total (in 2 parts) about virtualization, the issues of virtual stall (including both causes and solutions), how the antecedents of virtualization can inform our modern approaches, the importance of data center automation, the impending tsunami of cloud computing, and much more.

If you have not seen it, you can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

(btw, if you have not seen the video archive on CIOZone.com, you really should – it includes some fantastic interviews with many virtualization and cloud experts and thought leaders including Microsoft Director David Greschler, Rackspace CTO John Engates, VMware GM Jim Morrisroe, VMware CIO Mark Egan, and my colleague and counterpart in our Virtualization Product Management team, CA Technologies VP Subo Guha – plus a host of other CIOs and IT experts. Definitely worth your time!)

I found a comment on the CIOZone.com discussion thread about the interview very interesting. It came from CIOZone member, Pete Simmeron (petesim), who posted:

Andi Mann, thanks for the great conversation, I learned a fair amount about some of the obstacles to implementing a virtualization solution. You mention issues like license control, deprovisioning excess virtualized servers, compliance, and how IT support staff do not necessarily scale to help bring an organization to the Utopian 100% virtualized environment. Well my question is then how do we move past these obstacles? Do we start slow and develop the necessary skills in house or do we hire from outside, and thinking ahead do you think this will become a highly sought after job skill in the next 10 years??

What a great question! It inspired me to a longer response than might be appropriate in a comment box, but here it is in full:

Pete, thanks for the comment.

Moving past the obstacles is certainly the goal, and it is not easy, but it is possible. I think automation tools are massively important, but people and process are key too.

For example, to manage licences properly, and to track which VMs are being used and which can be reclaimed, some type of asset and inventory registry is an excellent tool. However, to really make this valuable, instead of just adding work manually recording VM allocations and movements, it really has to be updated automatically when VMs are provisioned and deprovisioned. This will save resources (admins don’t have to manually assign and collect VMs and licenses), save costs (licences can be more easily reused instead of adding new license costs), and help expand virtualization deployment and maturity (admins can move onto virtualizing more complex systems, rather than just babysitting existing VMs).

However, it is also important to address the people & process issues, not just the technology issues. For example, you have to make sure that IT admins and even VM owners don’t deliberately find ‘workarounds’ for the asset registry that might make their job a little easier, and maybe even save their department some money, but which actually end up costing the wider company a lot more in terms of compliance breaches and increased license costs. It is also critical to make sure there is a clear, known, and easily accessed process in place (ideally one which is automatically enforced) to work with VM owners/requestors to identify and deprovision VMs that are no longer in use. This will make sure the technology benefits accrue as expected, but also will simplify some complex and problematic VM management activities.

As to where you start, a lot depends on existing process and technology maturity, organization size, the most pressing problems, and the overall goals. Most orgs will do best to solve one problem at a time with the people they have – perhaps managing VM performance, or controlling licenses, or automating provisioning. But very mature orgs will likely be able to do more up front, like implementing a service catalog and service desk approach to automated provisioning and deprovisioning, or even combining this with resource pools and self-service to start on the journey to cloud computing. Meanwhile, smaller orgs will probably need to bring in experts at least temporarily to help them get over the hump, as they are typically harder-pressed to skill up and resource in-house for such significant IT changes.

Finally, yes, I absolutely believe this will be an in-demand skill for years to come. The evidence is already there, in the higher average pay rates for administrators with virtualization certifications, and I think this will continue. Administrators and managers that can effectively harness tools, processes, and people to overcome virtual stall will end up driving advances in virtualization – not just increasing the number of VMs deployed, but improving their virtualization maturity. This in turn will drive not just the incremental (albeit short-lived) CapEx savings from server consolidation, but also to fundamental and long-term gains in OpEx reduction, business agility, service availability, continuity, and more that comes when virtualization (and cloud) transforms from a tactical IT project to a strategic business enabler.

Of course, I have an opinion (anyone who knows me will not be at all surprised by that!), but I am also very interested in what other people think is going to be the key to Pete’s questions. Please do go ahead and check out the video on CIOZone.com, and please add to the discussion either there or here. Or, like me, both!