Roundtable: Virtual victory

Virtualisation offers considerable financial and environmental advantages to users, finds Fleur Doidge

Sanderson: Virtualisation is taking hold across a wider range of organisations

Virtualisation is becoming a reality in more organisations as public and private sector alike seek to reap the advantages of cost and resource savings coupled with increased efficiency across the IT infrastructure. A trend rather than a technology, virtualisation is becoming entwined in the thinking of the desktop administration department as much as in the server room, and even in SMEs.

Neil Sanderson, virtualisation and management product manager at Microsoft, says the industry is just at the stage where virtualisation is taking hold across a wider range of organisations.

Smaller end users, however, may need more assistance than large enterprises to deploy and integrate complex, overarching technological strategies such as virtualisation. And that is where, of course, the channel comes in.

“For the past few years, it was the preserve of large organisations with large numbers of servers. It is now something much more available to everyone, both on the server and on the desktop,” says Sanderson.

“There are more options, and prices are coming down. And the benefits are much more prevalent.”

Partners can reap the rewards due to the clear return on investment (RoI) that may be demonstrated to customers of all sizes. Partners alone have the experience and expertise to follow through on the promise of virtualisation, by educating and explaining to customers what it means and what technologies it might involve.

Consultancy is key with offerings such as virtualisation that are more about a different way of understanding and deploying the whole gamut of IT infrastructure than buying and selling any particular type of technology.

Building on server consolidation
Virtualisation allows users not just to consolidate on the server side but build on that over time and develop increasing efficiencies and improvements via an overall solution.

On the desktop, virtualisation can be used just for the applications, or users can virtualise the entire desktop in a thin-client type approach. This is an area in which public sector customers in particular are interested, due to the large and dispersed nature of the organisations. And almost every customer wants to save money, with budget high on the agenda.

“What virtualisation really means is that you have got options,” says Sanderson.

David Caughtry, director of e-business at specialist distributor Computerlinks, agrees with Sanderson, saying that he is definitely seeing more interest in virtualisation from customers.

“The obvious benefits of virtualisation include reducing the physical hardware and lower power consumption,” says Caughtry. “People are now realising that you can extend the total cost of ownership (TCO) for end users by bringing in strategies around power consumption. The green story is very strong at the moment. IT managers are very aware of the rising costs of data.”

As virtualisation extends its tendrils throughout the whole IT infrastructure, customers are also seeing security benefits ­ as long as they remember that a collection of insecure virtual servers can be just as insecure ­ if not more ­ than a bunch of physical servers.

Many tools now exist to make their manageability vision real but customers will need reseller help to achieve it.

“And larger security vendors are now coming to market with virtualised offerings for their products,” says Caughtry. “Customers need to see what is happening in that virtual world. The reality is that the threats are still the same.”

Virtualisation is really moving more towards the desktop, though, as the understanding and practice of server virtualisation becomes more embedded in the culture of business IT. And users are driving that move to virtualise the desktop, in part because more of them are working ­ and expect to be able to work just as well ­ remotely whether at home, in an airport, at a business conference or at the office.

Customers are requesting virtualisation
Nick Hutton, principal consultant at specialist virtualisation reseller 360IS,
says customers are actually requesting virtualisation. Rather than having to sell it from concept up, end users of all sizes are demonstrating some understanding of virtualisation.

“A year or so ago, a lot of our customers were large enterprises, but in the past 12 months with the price coming down, Microsoft’s entrance into the market and the growing popularity of Citrix solutions, we are seeing smaller companies ­ probably with 200 or so employees ­ asking about virtualisation,” says Hutton.

That said, securing and managing the virtualised environment remains a challenge for customers and an opportunity for the channel.

“Virtualised services, desktops and so on may be managed by the same processes that are used to manage the physical environment. But about 70 per cent of virtualised environments will be less secure than the physical environment,” Hutton adds.

Des Lekerman, managing director of managed services provider Eurodata Systems, says he too has seen prices come down coupled with a shift in end user thinking from his company’s midsize-to-large customers. Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 is also playing a role, as is the ability to deploy management tools and help people get visibility of their infrastructure.

“They were deploying virtualisation specifically for disaster recovery in the early stages,” he says. “We were trying to persuade those customers to deploy virtualisation into production environments, but they were not sure about that ­ they wanted to stick with the disaster recovery side. In the last 18 months, we have seen a big shift to using virtualisation for production systems.”

Virtualisation may merely exacerbate the management challenge that has always been there. An IT team that buys a number of physical servers may not know where they all are and what they are doing but the same also holds true for virtualised servers.

“However, what it means is that if you want 80 servers you can just bang your head against the keyboard 80 times, and there they are,” says Sanderson. “But you need to take all those servers and keep them up to date. And then actually knowing what the performance is of all those apps in those virtualised environment is a real management challenge.”

Education and skill-sets
Computerlinks’ Caughtry says education is key and will represent a “huge” opportunity for the channel.

“Show customers how they can make more on their bottom line when budgets are squeezed,” he says. “There is still a large amount of education needed on how to manage it, control it and the like. Resellers can provide the services and enable success around a virtualisation project, looking at business issues, all the way through to deployment and ongoing maintenance.”

Lekerman says business skills and the right technical skill-sets must be sourced by the channel. Parts of the virtualisation market are still immature ­ suggesting that some skills may prove hard to locate or in the right combinations sought by channel partners, especially small ones without a large human resources budget.

“We have been in this market for three-and-a-half years, so we have got a team of people,” he says. “But we are finding a lot of education there too that needs to go on. With Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), there is still a big gap. Everyone in the market is talking about it but there are not any large-scale customers who have put it into deployment.”

Some traction is now being seen in the NHS and gradually it is spreading into mainstream business, but the awareness is only spreading and developing slowly.

Steven Black, principal technologist at VAR and consultancy Charteris, says that from a Microsoft solutions point of view, the cost model around VDI can be difficult to understand.

This can hinder sales, because it is not as easy to demonstrate a clear financial benefit to the customer. Proving the total cost of ownership calculations can be tricky ­ or at least trickier than in traditional server virtualisation. Then all the applications must be packaged ­ on top of getting the infrastructure right and ensuring their network can support it.

Emerging VDI and service opportunities
That said, the opportunities for VDI appear to be developing.

“We are seeing customers who thought that VDI was a kind of panacea,” says Sanderson. “You just run the desktop in the datacentre and run it through on some kind of thin client device. It is not a guaranteed return; you need to understand what you are looking to deliver.

“We do have the Lancashire constabulary looking at building a VDI infrastructure for their offices, but [on top of] the traditional benefits of server virtualisation, carbon dioxide savings and opex. They can be working with the local authority, but still access data over their app from wherever they are.”

Couple that with savings made and the channel still has a convincing sell
­ as long as resellers can explain the benefits clearly to potential customers.
VDI will not always be the right solution; simply virtualising the applications on
the desktop ­ rather than the entire desktop itself ­ may deliver benefits.

“I think it is an incredible opportunity for partners to give value. Like with server virtualisation, there is a large amount of consultancy,” says Lekerman. “We are finding that above the physical apps and hardware there is a big managed services opportunity.”

Ensuring customers have the right processes to make the most of their virtualised deployments is also critical, according to Black. Tools from the physical side, along with the right processes, can be implemented on the virtual side. If they are not, the final result will suffer.

“A customer who licenses a virtual server that hosts many virtual machines will only need to [make that mistake] once, because they remember the pain. We ask what tools do you have in place to manage the services?” he says. “You need product, good processes, tools, and people in place.”

A practical example
Hutton says 360IS recently completed a virtualisation deployment for financial services company Demica. This customer provides specialised working capital solutions via consultancy, advice and IT services to various banks and financial institutions. Its London data warehouse processes billions of dollars in transactions from around the world.

Each of Demica’s new customers had its own dedicated server ­ a veritable and diverse server sprawl. Meanwhile, demand for its services had increased.

The consultancy found that only one out of every 20 or even every 40 of the physical servers was needed, with RoI for the consolidation achievable in six months. 360IS deployed a virtualisation appliance with integrated hypervisor, resulting in reduced hosting costs, power consumption and real estate alongside lower hardware maintenance requirements.

The new set-up should be more resilient and easier to scale up ­ allowing faster provisioning of new customers and better use of shared storage.

While consultancy was critical to the assessment and design, the physical infrastructure is streamlined. A single hardware platform eases maintenance, upgrades, capacity planning and management while reducing costs.

“As we start to talk more about utility computing, cloud computing, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), do we not think that even IT companies worry less about the [actual physical] cables, nuts and bolts of a solution?” says Hutton.

The future for the channel is increasingly in a focus on business benefits for the customer, and using whatever technology is best suited to the solution that produces that result. Just like virtualisation, in fact.

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