Server Huggers Block The Path To Virtualisation

The perverse objection

So why isn’t everyone virtualising? An audience poll of the webinar found that around a quarter had yet to do any significant virtualising, even given the obvious benefits.

“Perversely, the reason more organisations don’t adopt virtualisation wholesale, is risk aversion,” said Thornton. It’s perverse, he explained, because, virtualisation clearly reduces IT risks, by making it faster and easier to deploy applications, providing more resilience, and cutting the cost of errors if something goes wrong.

However, it seems organisations – like people – don’t have a realistic perception of risks. Just as people are more concerned about the dangers of air travel than crossing the road, organisations fear virtualisation more than they fear the routine failures of their un-virtualised IT estate, because virtualisation still seems like a step into the unknown.

This fear of the unknown came across in a webinar poll, where forty percent of the listeners expressed confusion about hypervisors – the basic technology underlying virtualisation. The same poll found that VMware has the lead amongst competing hypervisors, with strong showing for the two major open source offerings, Xen (which is backed by Citrix and the basis of Oracle’s VirtualBox) and KVM (backed by Red Hat and many others).

A big problem is that virtual servers are difficult to map onto organisational structures developed in a pre-virtual world.  Departments which own their own IT assets may turn into “server-huggers” when the prospect of virtualisation is raised.

“Processes that worked with hardware servers may not work for virtual servers” said Thornton. Corporate structures are often bult around ownership, and users within the organisation may be unable to grasp the value of virtualisation, if it means they no longer “own” their server.

Who owns the hardware is often an easier question to answer than who owns the virtual server, said Thornton. It may also be harder to budget for the virtual server, which costs almost nothing unless it makes heavy use of the shared IT resource – compared with the phycical server, which has a big one-off cost for the department, but whose ongoing costs are mostly hidden.

“Organisations in general don’t have robust processes in place to deal with this,” said Thornton. Both men agreed that the strongest resistance to virtualisation comes from departments which own servers, in particular within finance, where legitimate requirements for reliability and governance may be used as arguments against any new procedure, or against change in general.

Arguments against virtualisation

Technical arguments, and financial arguments may be used against virtualisation, but these are usually a red herring, said Puttick. His organisation does not allocate IT costs, because that is a “negative” approach, which “goes with the idea that IT and the business are somehow separate”.

“In fact, IT is there to deliver business strategy.” said Thornton. “It should not be seen as something separate.” However, IT does need to accept that many of the things it delivers are now a commodity. IT people operating at board level should accept that many of their treasured assets are now liabilities, and be prepared to move to more simplified structures, shifting the emphasis away from hardware.

“Virtualisation lets the IT department people focus on the business, instead of making the IT work,” said Thornton.

This has also been put forward as a main benefit of the more radical process of moving IT to clouds – virtual resources outside the company firewall. Whether through internal virtualisation or cloud computing, it looks as if IT managers need to concentrate on business processes, the thing that distinguishes one business from another.