Virtualization - What is Holding Some Companies Back?

I have been following virtualization stories over the past weeks and there is a constant flow of articles about this company and that company virtualizing production servers and the benefits associated with a virtual environment. Here at Nortec we virtualized from 21 physical servers at our head quarters to 5 physical servers and never looked back. We now have plenty of old servers we can use in labs at each of our offices and we are very happy with the solution. We have also integrated VDI in some offices but this has been limited as we have a mobile workforce with laptops primarily.

I have posted multiple articles this year on the wave of virtualization. Most companies have either already created a virtual environment or plan to do so this year.

One question is: What is holding some companies back from virtualization and are they moving fast enough?

I came across this Forrester report commissioned by Cisco in January, 2009. Essentially what the report found is that “consolidations is still a strong motivation, but equally important are improving disaster recovery and improving server flexibility.” A Large percentage (60% - 70%) of companies surveyed are using the advanced virtualization capabilities.

A challenge with virtualizing corporate infrastructure is that almost 50% of companies using virtualization have only been working with it for 1 – 2 years and less than 20% have used it for more than four years. Clearly not everyone has figured out what to do!

Forrester Consulting outlines 4 Steps:

1.Standardize
2.Consolidate
3.Advanced workload management
4.Share resources between application domains with service level guarantees

For the details here is a link to the Forrester report on Cisco’s web site:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns856/ns872/virtualization_C11-521100-0Forrester.pdf