How To Get Your Penny-Pinching FD To Approve Virtualisation

As a savvy IT Manager, you know that server virtualisation makes a lot of sense. There’s just one problem: Your company’s penny-pinching Financial Director probably won’t approve it.

Let’s look at your options.

Option 1 – The Full Works, From Day One

You could try to change the FD’s mind, making the business case for an expensive all singing, all dancing VMware™ platform, with enterprise-class support, full training  and a full range of tools for migration and management.

Good luck with that.

If you ARE going to try that, you might want to mention that virtualisation will help you…

• consolidate your servers, reducing the number you have to support
• reduce your hosting costs
• move applications between servers with ease
• clone production systems for testing purposes
• back up snapshots of each system
• isolate your applications from each other, improving up-time and security.

Option 2 – Build Your Own Platform, on the cheap

What they don’t notice, they can’t veto.

The idea here is to get going on the cheap, prove that virtualisation works, get funding approved, then migrate everything from the cheap platform to a reliable one.

Supposing VMware is out of your budget, you’ll need to use a cheaper option that’s less robust. You’ll have to migrate applications – some of which are business-critical – with just basic tools, little training and almost no support.

Good luck with that.

Option 3 – Hosted Virtualisation

Thankfully, there is a third option. It avoids the high initial costs of a big-bang approach, and the risks and compromises of creating a platform on the cheap.

Instead of building your own virtualisation platform from scratch, you rent capacity on an existing platform that is set-up and managed by VMware certified professionals. You don’t have to worry about the hardware, or the virtualisation layer, so you face a less steep learning curve.

Because it’s hosted, there are no VMware licenses for you to buy, so you don’t face the same upfront costs that you would if you were creating your own platform.

Even though the servers are in a different data centre, you can still make them  part of your domain, so that the change of location is invisible to your employees. You can even use VPNs instead of WAN connections.

Start at your own pace, virtualise just a few servers or applications to start with. As you and your business get more comfortable with virtualisation you can make the bid for the FD’s cash, to build that all singing, all dancing platform, either on site, or in a data centre.

When your in-house platform is ready, you can effortlessly migrate your hosted VMs (Virtual Machines) to the new platform, in a flash with almost no downtime.

I know which approach I’d prefer. Your penny-pinching FD would like it too.

As luck would have it, we provide hosted virtualisation (OK, you saw that coming, didn’t you!)

To make hSo your co-conspirator in getting round your penny-pinching FD, give us a call on 020 7847 4510