Don’t Get Stuck on Your Virtualization when going to the cloud

Going virtual is easy at the beginning but get more and more complicated when moving further. So having a good strategy and knowing the goal of the journey always help.

A typical virtualization journey consists of three and half distincts phases:

 

• Phase I: IT Production. Virtualization is used primarily for server consolidation of IT-owned applications.  

• Phase II : Business Production. Businesses begin using virtualization for business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Oracle, or SAP, and deploy more advanced virtualization automation and management features.

  • Phase III: IT as a Service (ITaaS). All applications are eligible to run in virtual machines (VMs), Advanced techniques are used to manage and monitor virtual servers, and IT organization and processes are updated to run efficiently within virtual infrastructure. Each phase got is benefits and it is also a pre-requisit to the next one.

With phase one you will save on hardware with server consolidation, most on the company have done this. Most of the VM are running non business critical Appliance.

 

Phase two, you get now a good experience of virtualization but most of your process still applying to physical world and mission critical software have not moved to virtualization. It s time to  become more mature with you virtualization project. first get some good tool to see what is going Inside your virtualization infra. Second adapt all your process to virtualization (security, provisioning, VM lifecycle, backup process...). Last start to move one by one your mission critical software and set automation on recurrent task. The saving will be made with automation and ability to scale up or down you application more easily.

Phase three: Now it time to make your network and storage component virtual if you want to be able to move apps from inside to outside your private cloud. Some people call it SDDC phase, every hardware component become virtual and lose his attachment to his physical location. In this phase you decide what your SLA will be and cost, you also prepare your catalog of services

Phase three dot five: It's ITaas, it's private cloud and hybrid cloud. It's time to set your service catalogue, train user how to work with it and put some agility in your business. So every apps will have a cost at the internal and you can move it to your cloud provider if it is cheaper...

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