Introduction

Although virtual machines are not a new concept for the mainframe world, the idea is fairly new to the production x86 server realm. Visualization in an x86 environment is a complete paradigm shift for IT, which has for many years been accustomed to deploying one application per server. Hardware and software vendors have also historically recommended one application instance per server. While this model was financially attractive for operating systems and server hardware vendors, it s increasingly a suboptimal way to run a company s IT infrastructure. Companies are realizing that the proliferation of servers is increasingly difficult to manage and can actually hinder IT from meeting the needs of business. CIOs agendas for cost performance, mergers and acquisitions, and compliance risk reduction are driving organizations toward server consolidation and visualization projects. Furthermore, consolidation and virtualization projects involve complexities beyond the technology. Consequently, this chapter deals with the people and process components that make up a server consolidation and virtualization project, and leverages many of the best practices and lessons learned from our customer engagements in the area of server consolidation.

One of the primary messages that Callisma delivers to our clients in our Server Virtualization Lessons Learned presentations is the fact that these projects require a significant amount of planning. Specifically, the planning phase should focus not only on architecture or technology components but also on the people and process components. All three components are necessary to consolidate servers and build operational efficiencies into the environment.