Virtualisation Management – making the virtual…real

We know that you probably don’t have time to read the top 10 reasons why virtualisation projects fail, so we’ve condensed these to our top five. Likewise, we know that you don’t want to spend your time worrying of the management of your virtualised environment. To ensure that your virtual server environment or data centre is managed effectively ring our virtualisation experts on 01858 438 548.

Top five reasons why virtualisation projects fail

1. No clear goals or objectives with the virtualisation project

As with any project, it’s worth defining the projects aims and goals. Then you have something to measure success or failure against. Map out what your critical success factors are, for example are they cost reductions (if so how much and from where?); building a more agile organisation; or creating a better business continuity plan.
Action: View our virtualisation video, to ensure that virtualisation is right for you.

2. Virtual machine creep

‘Hold on, we only used to have 15 real servers, now we’ve got 45 virtual machines!’. Someone has been trigger happy with their VMware virtual machine templates and you are now spending more time managing virtual servers than you did working with real ones.
Action: Download our virtualisation best practice guide to ensure you don’t suffer from virtual machine sprawl.

3. You don’t go all the way….

Another reason for failure is not virtualising the entire server estate. Historically, some businesses have resisted from virtualising certain servers, usually MS Exchange and database servers. Settling for a half- way house of virtualised and real environment means that they don’t see the full benefits of the virtualisation project.
Action: Use the Abtec Virtualisation RoI Calculator this will calculate the benefits based on virtualising your entire estate.

4. ‘How do I do that?’ – lack of internal skills

Once your environment is virtualised you then have to use is on a day to day basis. If your teams doesn’t have the right skills, it’s never going to see the full impact of virtualisation.
Action: Check out our virtualisation training courses. We can deliver these at your premises, over the web or in our dedicated training suite, the choice is yours.

5. No failover or redundancy plan

We all know that budgets are tight, but cutting back on your business continuity, or backup plan is a sure-fire way of encouraging the worst to happen. ‘Shaw’s Law’ states that IT issues occur when you most need your IT. Virtualisation presents a fantastic, and very low cost, way of building an effective disaster recovery plan. Don’t scrimp on that, you’ll thank us for it.
Action: Abtec provides disaster recovery solutions for all of your IT and communications technologies, ring us on 01858 438 548, to find out how we can help you be more secure.

Managing virtualisation projects and environments is our speciality. Ring us on 01858 438 548 to ensure that your virtualisation project is managed effectively.