How can the mid-market benefit from the latest in virtualization technology?
Virtualization has made it easier and cheaper to deploy, consolidate, and test systems.
PATRICK PLANTE
IT Manager, Collège St-Jean de Vianney
The Collège St-Jean-Vianney is a private secondary school on the eastern part of the Island of Montréal. We’re celebrating our 50th anniversary in 2010. Presently we have about 1,250 students and approximately 130 employees. This is a regional school with a general purpose academic curriculum for grades 8 to 12. As a result, we can’t rely on the centralized server environments provided by large school boards. We have to take responsibility for our own infrastructure. We run Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, which is managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. The switch to a virtualized platform was a welcome change from the demands of the previous environment; before, we had 16 physical servers and I was managing them on my own – it was quite a job. So, I went and did some tests, and found that the technology was viable, with the Microsoft solution being significantly more affordable than anything else out there: the savings were in the 75% to 80% range. And the migration to R2 was amazing; we used a CD for the upgrade, and it took only 30 minutes for each server to be up and running again. Now with System Manager and virtualization I can check all 16 servers in 10 minutes. I can check everything using my eyes instead of my shoes. Another incredible thing is that the college is about to purchase four new servers and migrate all of its 16 virtual servers in one night, including SAN and LAN connections. This is pretty amazing, and shows the beauty of virtualization. Imagine how much time it would have taken to purchase 16 servers and install them one by one.
BRUCE COWPER
Virtualization Lead, Microsoft Canada
When it comes to virtualization, the mid-market is the fastest growth area. The technology has made it easier and cheaper to deploy, consolidate, and test systems. No matter if you have already deployed some form of virtualization, there are still lots of opportunities, but there are also things that customers need to be aware of. For example, many Microsoft customers are not fully aware that they may already own the licenses and the tools to leverage the Microsoft virtualization platform. Another is around ROI. Many customers have invested in data centre consolidation – that was the first phase – and are now looking for other workloads to virtualize. It could be desktop virtualization for application compatibility, perhaps they are looking at deploying other applications such as SharePoint, or looking for ease of deployment for Windows 7. In fact, partners are finding huge opportunities with Windows 7, because the desktop and server platforms Integrate together so well, and lend themselves to scenarios like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).One of the biggest challenges customers are having today is managing the lifecycle of the virtualized environment, from testing, to deployment, to patching. It doesn’t matter whether you are using Windows or something else, customers are coming to us to understand how they can manage everything from the hardware layer through to the services and end user experience. These technologies are helping customers invest in scenarios such as disaster recovery, branch office, and looking towards the next workload, whether in their data center or the cloud.
DAVE STEVES
Steeves and Associates
I have worked with Microsoft since Windows NT Server was a beta product. When it came out, Windows Server disrupted the market and created a new standard OS platform that was easy to use and cost effective. As a result it was widely adopted allowing Microsoft to continue to build on the platform adding new applications and tools with a rich partner, ISV and support ecosystem. All of these things have greatly benefited clients. Microsoft is not always first with a new capability, and many companies have tried to dethrone Microsoft by being first, but in the end Microsoft has prevailed as the winner and best choice. This is because for Microsoft it is essential that a solution integrate into the entire platform. This allows customers to build on their investment, feeling safe that they won’t have to throw it all away and start fresh on a new platform. The same is true with virtualization today. Microsoft was not the first, partly because they wanted their family of virtualization products to fully work across their complete platform. This means that both physical and virtual environments are all managed in the same way with the same tools and consistency. The ‘puck’ is going next to the cloud. Here too Microsoft has an excellent roadmap and set of applications to get you there. Again, they have leveraged their platform with their unique Software plus Services strategy to bring the right solutions to the market in a timely manner, building a highly functional and integrated platform with a consistent user experience and set of management and development tools from the desktop to the data centre.
PETE LINDSTROM
Principal Analyst, Spire Security
For folks in the mid-market, there is still plenty of room in the virtualized server environment. The challenge for them is to be able to assess the technical savings that might benefit the organization itself. Larger companies with strong IT departments are already down the road to virtualization, but at the smaller end of the mid-market there are many organizations that are dabbling. They may not have the ability to give it their proper attention, as they spend a lot of time putting out fires. For those people it’s harder to plan for a migration to a fully virtualized environment. The irony is that the mid-market is made for virtualization – there is excess capacity all over the place, with bits and pieces of processing and applications that can be consolidated to get a real bang for your buck. But this assumes that the tech folks have the opportunity to do the research and planning. This is where there is clearly an opportunity for partners to advise, because they can offer the strategic planning capacity and can introduce a level of comfort that mid-market organizations need. Fortunately the benefits are fairly obvious and the technology well vetted, so often the real questions are: will you do this in-house, or will you rely on the virtualized environment of a service provider? If you are outsourcing, then the expectations might be higher. You need to make sure that they’ll be there for the long haul, that their prices are reasonable, and that their virtualized environments are run efficiently.
VERN BOLINIUS
Virtualization Practice Lead, Metafore
Metafore has been an IT solutions provider for over 20 years. We offer managed services, IT resourcing and training, all of which have been positively impacted by virtualization technologies. In the past half decade we have seen virtualization become mainstream. In that time Metafore has designed and deployed hundreds of virtualization solutions for customers across Canada – it has now become a key offering in our professional services portfolio. This is because customers are recognizing the value of virtualization in terms of cost savings, both from a hardware perspective and ease of management. There is no question that it makes sense in terms of data centre real estate and procurement: from the consolidation of physical machines to the radical reduction in time required to spin up new servers. What might have been a two week process to install, configure, and present a machine to a user is now down to twenty minutes. Back up strategies have also changed dramatically; you can capture an entire virtual machine and restore in one fell swoop. Historically, much of the market waited to see how virtualization would play out; today, most companies are deploying it directly into production, because both mid-market and enterprise organizations can see how virtualization reduces internal administration. They are now taking it beyond Hyper-V and the server to look at virtualizing desktops. As a result, we are seeing a lot of additional products that are built on virtualization – the third party application market has risen to meet demand, from the desktop to lab and capacity management.
Most mid-market companies are deploying virtualization directly into
production, because they can see how it reduces internal administration.
