Virtualization is for many IT managers the 'magic bullet' to solve all problems and to optimize the Data Center. VCA consults its customers - even before starting a project - clarify at all key factors that are substantial for a successful virtualization project. Together with our customers we are developing a consulting project that embeds the business vision for the virtual Data Center in development organization, business processes, management systems and last but not least employee behavior patterns.

Some topics of this virtualization consulting are:

• Does virtualization technology help you to reach your business goals? One of the most important factors when implementing virtualization in the enterprise is to line up the technology to business goals. To realize the success of virtualization companies have to define business targets to reach long term goals.
  
• What is the criteria for the success of a virtualization project? Virtualization is not always the Swiss army knife for solving short term problems. Also saving costs is not always the prime target of virtualization. Is Virtualizaiton adding flexibility to the business? Is Quality of services criteria?
• Are this new risk considered and is it possible to accept them? Virtualization reduces the personal and technical resources in the Data Center and concentrates many users and applications on a virtual infrastructure. The impact of hardware problems, human errors, security holes, planning problems and support problems are far reaching.
• Are company guidelines and organization ready for the introduction of virtualization?
  In many companies departments are working in closed infrastructure. This can result in problems when different business units have to work on the same server.
• Are current systems and applications compatible to virtualization? Applications and systems not always work in combination with virtualization. Applications that require much resources like high I/O and the need of direct access to hardware might create problems.
• Are there enough skills available for planning, implementation and operation in the enterprise?
  Early training and education of project managers, the determination of the requirements, and documentation of the necessary changes and the accomplishment of a Proof of Concept (POC) to test the desires solution is mandatory.
• Virtualization can open new security hole and vulnerability.
  The company is possibly not prepared for this. Conventional technology is not able to deal with this challenges, attack on hypervisor based solutions are not recognized by current security programs.
• Capacity of infrastructure for the new virtualization solution might be limited. This can be the case if, based on the new possibilities, a large number of new virtual machines is activated. Here detailed strategies and policies for capacity planning are necessary to have enough resources available for the new systems and ongoing Data Center operations.
• Virtualization is a new management challenge. While virtualization reduces the number of physical resources it increases the complexity of the complete environment. The simple creation and distribution of a VM can easily lead to numerous new of VM's that increases also management expenditure. The additional virtualization layer also increases the complexity in the Data Center.