Perhaps it goes without saying, but when you’re rolling out virtualization services throughout your company, many of the most dramatic changes to your organization are going to occur within your IT infrastructure. To properly deploy a virtual environment and reap as many benefits to it as possible, you and your IT staff need to be prepared for these changes well in advance.
As always with virtualization, more planning and training beforehand leads directly to greater returns later on. These are some of the areas you should focus on, when prepping your staff to implement your new virtualization services.
- Provisioning: Your hardware and application needs will change significantly once you move to a virtual server system. The needs of individual applications will play a much less of a role in determining your server provisioning, as opposed to the ability of those servers to contribute to your overall virtualization strategy.
- IT Training: Most companies who don’t progress beyond basic virtualization services do so because of a lack of knowledge within their IT department. Focusing on a robust training program will help ensure the project can continue to grow and provide increasing benefits as time goes on.
- IT Practices: Internal procedures such as ticket tracking and resolution and workstation rollouts become much more efficient in a virtual environment. Processes such as a wide-scale software deployment can be done in hours, rather than days. You should evaluate your internal practices to ensure you’re gaining the most efficiency from your virtual network.
- Unified teams: Many existing structures within your IT department can be integrated in a virtual environment. There would be little need, for example, to maintain separate Windows and Linux teams in a virtual environment. This sort of streamlining can lead directly to cost savings, which increase as more of the network goes virtual.
- Facilities: In general, a virtual network requires significantly less floor space and power consumption than a physical one. You may be able to consolidate IT into a smaller space, saving money and making it more efficient. These savings can go straight into your ROI.
Focus on Growth
The benefits of your virtualization services grow as you implement more virtual projects, and a well-prepared IT team is crucial for this to happen. Create an IT team that’s fully comfortable with virtualization and enthusiastic about its potential, and you’ll be positioned to see large returns as the project spreads through your organization.