Selling customers the bigger picture

There is no questioning the interest of Australian customers in virtualisation. They know it can have a profound impact on their infrastructure. But in a market approaching saturation with the virtualisation message, how can partners and integrators differentiate themselves?

One immediate opportunity is by thinking about virtualisation more broadly from the desktop to the data centre. There is undoubtedly still a large market opportunity for server virtualisation.The data centre of the future will move from a physical representation of resources to a virtual model including storage, networking and computational resources. But virtualisation has applications today across the IT spectrum and not just in the data centre, to help customers with their key challenges – reducing cost and increasing performance. Additional types include desktop, application and presentation virtualisation.

Management is the key point. Customers shouldn’t need to manage virtualisation; they need to be able to manage a branch office or a university campus or a head office from end to end. That requires one pane of glass to look through to manage and gain insight on all resources – physical and virtual. Gartner analyst, Tom Bittman, noted, “Virtualisation without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualisation in the first place.”

Management tools are the centre of gravity for virtualisation of all types, enabling customers to realise the full promise of virtualisation while minimising its risks, such as unauthorised virtual machine creation and virtual server sprawl. Most importantly, good management should provide a unified system for managing all virtual and physical assets. With the System Centre family of products – Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager – customers have a suite of products that work the same against physical and virtual resources, giving increased insight.

Both virtualisation and management are also key technologies to help organisations progress towards what Microsoft calls Dynamic IT. Essentially this is a long-term technical approach to help customers make IT a strategic asset in their businesses by creating more flexibility in IT systems, reducing costs and streamlining change.

With this in mind, here are an additional three key opportunities we see for partners to help them set up for the virtualised future with customers.

1. Windows Servers ready for upgrade

With several versions of Windows Server 2008 available with Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution as a standard component, there is a great opportunity for Microsoft partners to pursue upgrades of customers’ existing Windows-based servers to take advantage of the significant cost benefits offered by employing Hyper-V in their environments. Any customers with a number of Windows Server 2003 R2-based servers (or earlier) can derive great value from consolidating the number of physical servers they have, as well as accessing other new functions such as Server Core installation option, by upgrading to the latest version of the operating system. Upgrading may also be the first step in having a Dynamic IT conversation with customers. The new product can reduce the cost of patching by 60 percent, power consumption by 10 percent (even without virtualisation) and enable greater control with PowerShell and Clustering.

2. Create a remote management service

Another opportunity is for partners and integrators to become service providers by offering outsourced system management services to customers, particularly in the small business and mid-market segments. This is done using the System Center management suite at both the partner and customer sites.

Service providers are required to install and configure Remote Office Manager at their site and allows providers to establish a secure connection to a customer’s implementation of SCE and remotely provide real-time management. This enables service providers to proactively monitor and prevent problems, as well as more immediately respond remotely to problems that do arise, as opposed to traditional reactive service models where customers experience a problem, call the service provider and expect a response.

For partners, deploying System Center means they are able to introduce predictable recurring maintenance fees, while for the user, it should reduce the costs associated with system downtime.

3. Virtualising workloads

One of the challenges many customers face when looking to deploy virtualisation is determining the workloads internally that could most benefit from being partially or fully virtualised. Not all server roles are suitable candidates for virtualisation. This is clearly an area that partners can assist by fostering appropriate skills and providing data centre design consultancy.

Microsoft has also released tools to help partners (and customers) determine the most appropriate workloads to virtualise and to assess whether existing servers are good candidates for virtualisation using Hyper-V. Employing manageable virtualisation technologies across the IT infrastructure is a major step towards creating a dynamic IT environment. A virtualisation strategy spanning the desktop to the data centre is the key to staying competitive in an increasingly dynamic, global and connected world.