Virtualization faces resistance from the wary

10.11.2006
Politics was one of the topics at VMware Inc.'s user conference this week, but the discussions had nothing to do with Tuesday's midterm elections in the U.S. Instead, those on hand for the conference talked about the political maneuvering sometimes needed to sell a technology that can unsettle the balance of power in an IT department.

Deploying a virtualization project means that internal business customers lose ownership of a particular server when servers are moved to a shared environment -- something that can make it difficult for IT managers to sell virtualization to their customers. But there may be resistance among IT staffers as well -- particularly if someone on the business side is championing the idea.

Concerns such as those prompted Larry Speights, a gas industry employee at a major company, to attend a session at VMworld devoted to the organizational challenges of virtualization deployments. Speights is working as a technical advisor on a VMware implementation, which represents a new technology for his company.

Control of server resources is an issue, he said. "The various owners of these systems say, 'It's my system and when it is virtualized it's not my system anymore, it is running shared with everyone else,'" he said.

IT staff may feel threatened because the push for virtualization "is not going through their approval process," said Brad Wagner, a technical lead for platform services at Georgia Pacific Corp. in Atlanta. "It's typically a bad thing when the executives agree to a technology and the technical people didn't invent it there."

Wagner and Gary Tierney, senior manager of technical services at Fair Isaac Corp. in Minneapolis, Minn., have each been on VMware systems for about three years and were on a panel here sharing strategies for selling virtualization internally and working through resistance. Fair Isaac provides a variety of analytical services, including credit scores.