Gartner: rookie virtualization mistakes to avoid

Alex Barrett Profile: Alex Barrett

What are the most common mistakes IT managers make when doing a server virtualization project? There are many, and they’re easily avoidable, said a gaggle of Gartner analysts at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Most virtualization goofs center around lack of planning and forethought, they said.

For example, on the storage front, perhaps the biggest mistake is to start a virtualization project without already having a SAN or shared storage in place, said Robert Passmore, a Gartner research vice president. “They get 75% of the way through a virtualization project and they realize they need a SAN, but by that point they don’t have the budget,” he said. “It’s a real disaster.”

Similarly, most virtualization newbies don’t anticipate the increase in demand that virtualization will place on their systems, nor the speed at which growth will occur.

“Virtualization introduces speed, and most processes aren’t ready for speed,” said Tom Bittman, another Gartner research VP. And because virtualization tends to remove artificial obstacles to provisioning new workloads, demand for services tends to double in highly virtualized environments, he said. To avoid being overwhelmed, newcomers to virtualization should consider implementing lifecycle management, as well as chargeback or showback.

Other rookie mistakes involve failing to treat the virtualization layer with enough gravitas.

In their enthusiasm for VMware, many IT managers make the mistake of moving too quickly to the latest and greatest release of the platform, said Passmore, oftentimes before ecosystem such as backup and management software are available.

And security of the virtualization layer is often overlooked, added Neil MacDonald, vice president and distinguished analyst. “These issues are overlooked because people say ‘nothing’s different,’ when really, a lot is different,” he said.

To avoid security problems, MacDonald suggested IT managers elevate virtualization to the same layer as the operating system. “Treat it like an OS,” he said, with all the attending hardening, patch management and compliance processes.

Finally on the desktop front, an overarching mistake is to fail to fundamentally rethink desktop support, said Mark Margevicius, vice president and research director. When it comes to the desktop, most organizations are built around a distributed device, he said, but “everything changes when you virtualize the desktop,” for instance, support processes, refresh rates, and budget allocation, to name a few. Without thinking desktop virtualization through up front, “you almost have more problems than the problems you solved with it.”

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Gartner: Converged infrastructure push will intensify, hide your wallet

Matt Stansberry Profile: Matt Stansberry

This week at the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas, analysts warned IT managers to avoid inadvertently backing into any vendor’s integrated stack.

For converged infrastructure platforms, “it’s too early, there are too many unknowns, and it will not serve you well over the long haul,” said Gartner VP David Capuccio in the Monday morning keynote.

Gartner’s Jeff Hewitt dubbed the converged infrastructure players The Big Five: Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Oracle. These vendors already have a piece of your data center budget, and are looking for more, acquiring companies or partnering to create an integrated stack.

Some IT managers are calling these converged systems the new mainframes: servers, storage, networking, operating systems, hypervisor, management tools and middleware all pre-integrated, and each layer of the stack is optimized with the vendor’s secret sauce.

Examples include the Cisco UCS, Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic machines, HP’s Bladesystem Matrix and VCE’s vBlock.

These machines can put up impressive performance numbers, and make vendor management simpler, but analysts and IT managers are wary of vendor lock-in.

“When you reduce your number of suppliers, you inherently increase risk and make it harder to switch providers, and you reduce your negotiation strength,” Hewitt said.

Gartner asked attendees: Which of the Big Five are you likely to buy from in 2011 that you’re not buying from today?

Cisco dominated with 33%, followed by HP 18%, IBM 17%, Dell 9%, and Oracle with 8%. Also, 15% said they didn’t plan to buy anything new from the big five.

“Cisco offering its network customers UCS is as easy of McDonalds offering fries with hamburger,” Hewitt said.

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Data center cost reduction strategies from Gartner

Matt Stansberry Profile: Matt Stansberry

This week at the Gartner Data Center conference, at a session on reducing data center costs, IT managers filled both the primary and overflow rooms. Gartner analysts John Enck and Raymond Paquet laid out some tips for shrinking data center spending.

But you can’t manage what you don’t measure. According to an audience poll, about 20% of the audience had no IT cost accounting in place at all, and 32% only tracked costs on physical assets. Over half the attendees were basically flying blind on their IT budgets.

Gartner said data center managers need to start automating processes. Around 38% of IT costs are personnel. If you want to cut costs, you need to cut people, according to Gartner.

Data center managers should also take a hard look at IT asset management to see what costs can be eliminated. “This is not one of those tools you will spend money on and don’t see ROI, you should see cost savings,” Enck said.

Around 80% of the audience had some kind of asset management tool in place. The rest had no systems in place or did manual inventory.

Gartner also said IT shops should learn a few things from the cloud computing providers, organizations running IT on such small margins that they need to be efficient with cash as possible.

-Storage will grow 800% in five years, so invest in the cheapest you can get away with.
-Buy the cheapest x86 machines you can find, exclusively rack based, not blades. 1U skinless, x86 servers, last year’s model where the cost is stripped out.
-Cloud providers primarily run Linux and open source systems management tools
-Power and cooling infrastructure are extremely efficient
-Delay purchasing the latest and greatest x86 procesors. The first six months of new Intel or AMD server has a premium price. Do you need that performance? Wait six months? Price drop. Another six months? Another drop.

A data center manager that works for a public entity in Southern California said his tactic for reducing data center operating costs is to put as much into capital expenses as possible. When he buys a server, he pays for five years of maintenance support up front, turning what would normally be consid