Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO has published the results of a survey of 300 CIOs on their use of virtualization. Lots of good data and analysis in the article (link below). Most interesting to me is the responses to the question of why people invested in virtualization:
Reasons to Virtualize Servers
Cut costs via server consolidation 81% Improve disaster recovery and backup plans 63% Provision computing resources to end users more quickly 55% Offer more flexibility to the business 53% Provide competitive advantage 13% (Respondents chose up to three)
SOURCE: CIO Research
From the standpoint of virtual lab management, the fact that 55% of the respondents are trying to accelerate their ability to provision computing resources to end-users is a great sign. It maps to what customers are telling us – they are seeing tremendous returns from automating the provisioning of virtual machines for support, training, testing, proof of concept, evaluations etc. Those conversations suggest that a virtual lab environment is becoming a platform supporting a host of non-production activities that traditionally have been slow, expensive, and considered tactical distractions for the IT ops group. Putting an automated utility in place allows the operations team to spend their time on things that are strategic to the business, instead of being interrupt-driven with deployment and configuration requests.
Tom Pisello describes how virtual lab management projects deliver double the ROI of comparable IT infrastructure projects. Great read! He uses VMware Lab Manager as an example but the numbers should hold for any virtual lab solution, and would be larger for systems that scale to larger environments and teams (such as Surgient VQMS).
