Virtualization: Its all about the right moves!

Or else you are in for a shock! That I can assure you. You have to be honest to yourself and also, as a Consultant, to the potential customers.

• Be realistic (Consultant or Customer): Not everything you know that is happening in the virtualization globospehere is in your reach. Things are happening a bit too fast. Just a tad bit too fast!
• Share your information: As a client you ought to really talk about your applications and their history, you should also talk about your fears of deploying virtualization. Consultants/Architect ought to discuss openly the issues and challenges that a firm might face should it ignore issues as backup strategy (even when virtualization is still in its infacy at your organization and you're testing the waters at the test environment or even building the test environment, please do everything to build the knowledge around, yes around the virtualization game. What backup strategy? Which tool? VCB? VM level backup? SaaS or Online backup like what CRC folks do? Or simple File level backups? Security? Provisioning? Policy? Life Cycle?) It all seems like a helluva work but it will do something very special: You will see more acceptance and the arguments to make it happen will be magically converted into a resolute decision forming.
• Watch out for good news but also for warnings: Knowing what can go wrong in advance is something everyone would want! But learning from others will help us work on a strategy that will eliminate all those unforeseen problems. Like this for instance made a smarter move to deploy a VI3 ready environment for continuous availability and thus adding value to its business and for instance this VirtSec paper from Bluelane talks about the security issues that 60% of VMs will be having by 2009! That may mean that you might be in serious trouble, if you're in that 60%!
  

Do mark my words, virtualization is the next standard, the next platform where we will build our businesses upon, it will oil the creaky process architecture which we lacked all these years. Sure there will be challenges but there will be lots of gains. Measuring challenges and gains, will put the vendor and customers on the profitable path. you don't do that, expect lots of bad blood. Lots!