Three Impediments to Virtualization

Earlier this week I attended an Infrastructure Virtualization Summit run by Informa in Sydney Australia. Such events are a great place to hear the arguments for adopting the topic at hand, in this case virtualization. But what I found interesting was the feedback from the floor and the common themes that emerged as to barriers to the adoption of virtualization.

• Lack of Necessary Skills
• Hidden Costs of Change
• Increased Risk Profile

Lack of Necessary Skills

Number one on the list was the perception of a lack of staff with the necessary skills. It was felt that virtualization brings with it a requirement for new skills and people with the necessary skill set are not easy to find. And when you do find them, they can be tricky to retain because they are in demand elsewhere. Good old supply and demand at work.

Hidden Costs of Change

There was a general feeling that there were hidden costs to adopting virtualization. It was clear that adopting virtualization within the organization is not just a technical challenge, but can also require changes to business processes. It was felt that the real cost of such change on an organization cannot easily be quantified up front.  Some felt these could easily cancel out the easy to identify up front and more tangible savings. The problem being the true total cost to the business isn’t known until afterwards. And although there are some quite well understood benefits, this still isn’t always enough to overcome some inertia.

Increased Risk Profile

The fear, uncertainty and doubt around putting all of your eggs in one basket was another perceived issue. Consolidating ten separate physical servers onto a single hardware platform with ten virtual servers for example, was seen as increasing the risks to the business, because a failure now can potentially take out ten applications instead of just one. Personally, I am not sure that this is a real problem, as computing environments today, even without virtualization are complex and thus prone to error, and it is debatable whether adding virtualization to the mix really increases the risks much more.  

However, real or not, the above are genuine concerns for potential virtualization consumers. The above outcomes are not the result of any formal research and were based on a relatively small sample of informal feedback, which may not necessarily be representative of the market. However, they are interesting all the same and possibly point to the industry needing to do a better job in addressing these concerns, along with promoting the more easy to sell benefits of virtualization it does today.