Mistakes and misconceptions

Virtualisation has been a great door-opener for the channel during the past couple of years but, as with all technology trends, there are lessons to be learned along the way. Attendees at the recent ARN virtualisation round table discussed common mistakes and misconceptions surrounding the technology.

From a sales point of view, the biggest mistake is telling customers they can virtualise everything.

"We haven't seen successful virtualisation of high-performance databases," The Missing Link's Jason Arnold-Auland said. "I recently had a customer tell me they wanted to virtualise everything so I told them we didn't want to be involved in the project."

Leading Solutions national services manager, Roy Pater, also pointed to legacy systems. For example, he said Leading has one customer using a UNIX platform from 1992 that runs an accounting system that no longer exists.

"This is an extreme case but the key learning point is that you should never tell a client that you can virtualise their entire environment. You'll come up short if they pull an ancient box out from under the desk," he said.

Technical Architecture Solutions comes across deployments that need to be fixed up because clients have used internal resources to virtualise or worked with an inexperienced reseller, according to TAS director, Tony Wilkinson. However, he said a more common complaint was due to poor management of virtual environments.

"They might have 200 machines before they virtualise and then find they have 200 within six months because it's so easy to recreate," he said. "That's part of governance rather than a fault in the software. According to Gartner, the next realm is management of virtual infrastructure.

"We have clients that are getting closer to utility computing than they ever have through server and storage virtualisation. We are tying in all the automation around that."