AITP Spring Conference Presentation
As I posted earlier this month I was presenting at the AITP Spring Conference in Bettendorf, IA. It was yesterday and I thought it was a great success. They had the biggest turnout they had ever seen. Thank you to all the folks at AITP for a great turnout and the opportunity to share our thoughts around virtualization.
I spoke last night about how important it is to have a strategy around virtualization instead of just deploying it tactically here and there within your environments. Sun Tzu had a great quote about this; “Strategy without tactics is the slowest road to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” This really rings true when it comes to implementing a disruptive set of technologies like virtualization.
I covered the Virtualization Adoption Lifecycle. If you haven’t seen this, I’ll try to do my best at putting that in electronic form so that you can see where you fall on the S-curve. There are 5 levels of this lifecycle and believe it or not, we still find folks that are on the first level.
I covered as well the steps to ensure that your efforts to develop a true strategy around virtualization is successful. These are founded on basic principles, but these are often overlooked and not done. I also shared some grahics that I wanted to make sure that the folks that attended and wanted to see they could.
I shared the Selection Criteria matrix that we have used in engagements to determine what is important in relation to the other criteria. By doing this matrix we have seen this become a valuable tool to assist your project team in putting some thought around multiple and, at times, competing alternatives or approaches to your strategy. As I stated last night we weight the criteria like flexibility, scalability, ongoing costs, one-time costs, etc. from 1 to 5 based on their level of relative importance to each other. As you move through the process and alternatives are discovered you can rate those on a scale of 1 to 3 based on the alternative’s ability to satisfy the a particular criteria. Once you have the ratings in you then multiply by the weight factor (aitp-spring-conference-2008-graphic)
We were having so much fun with the presentation, we ran long and I didn’t get to cover tools around developing information around your servers. There are a number of tools that you can use. The ones that we use in engagements range from the VMware Capacity Planner to the CiRBA Data Center Intelligence tool (http://www.cirba.com/) Perfmon can also be used, to provide you with basic data.
Again I’d like to thank the Illowa Chapter of the AITP for having me and Alliance Technologies over to present.
Cheers
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