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I was speaking with Andy, he was complaining. He is rather busy over in Canary Wharf. The IT team has created a new department to focus on the delivery of their virtualization solution, I was interested to know what was going on, what his issues were, so I did a below the radar question and answer session over coffee, resulting in the conversation below. Andy is a Windows Server Manager, the company is a multinational and all links that might identify him have been removed.

So what’s going on? I ask

They’ve created a new team to take over the virtualization activities and it’s rubbish. They suffer from big head syndrome.

Isn’t that a bit emotional, what do you mean? I reply.

Well we have a few communication issues.

By that I mean they have taken over the virtualization platform, and we’re fine with that, the issue is that they see the VMware and the Hyper-V environments as their layer, they support the virtual machine part but nothing else. So as a user and as a support team working along side, if we get a call for a virtual machine we have to speak to them, but they give us the industry standard statement, “your session is fine, the ESX server is fine, must be a Windows/Linux issue”.  Their list of what they do seems to be smaller than what they don’t, check out this email I got from them they do not look after the following:

• Upgrading or changing virtual machine configurations, including disk space, memory or CPU, that is the responsibility of the core operating system teams
• Decommissioning virtual servers, the application owner, business sponsor or core operating system team will handle the formal decommission and notify the virtualization team when it is time to delete the virtual slice
• Performance monitoring of individual virtual machines and managing system configurations in line with the core operating systems best practice
• On call support or fault identification and analysis will be handled by the core operating system teams and then escalated to the virtualization team once the issue has been identified
• Managing inventory of the virtual machines in terms of capacity and reporting – that is done by the core operating system teams (Windows/Unix)

They and I quote: “Build the ESX and Hyper-V environments, allocate new network and storage connectivity where required, continuing to develop the organizational virtualization strategy “or to the rest of the ‘core operating system team’ adopt the big head syndrome and only do what it is they choose which seems to change on a daily basis.

Are you and the team not being a bit emotional in what you say, any jealousy that you aren’t doing it?

It’s more frustration in terms of ownership. I want them to own the service that they provide, an issue isn’t always black and white, I can’t turn around to a business user and say your server pings therefore its not my problem, and I don’t expect an infrastructure team regardless of who they are to do what I perceive to be the same thing.

There seems to be a reluctance for the virtualization team to get involved in the mundane, the boring stuff, the stuff that in fact pays the bills and actually makes a difference to the end user.  As I look at our queue we have 37 requests for configuration changes to virtual machines. Is there a reason other than we don’t want to that they don’t do this work?

Would they not learn more about the server estate, speak with end users and get a sense of identity? Understand the issues involved and what requirements there might be in the virtual machine configuration? The initial specifications for Windows 2003 virtual machines were 512MB RAM and 10GB disk space for the operating system drive until we requested  more stating that this was not suitable as users were complaining about disk space and memory/performance.

The virtual infrastructure needs to be deployed and supported differently. Your ESX server might work, the network might be configured and the storage fine, but if my virtual machine does not work from an end user standpoint “it’s pants, and I don’t care what you say”. The fact that the team focuses on strategy and ESX server builds means that as a team they do not get involved in the day to day issues, they don’t interact with the end user means when an issue arises we have the same communication issues in which either a unix or windows guy will say this bit isn’t working, any advice, and the standard “ESX is fine, ALL IS WELL”. As a result when we do start having issues with virtual machines, the windows and the unix guys start seeing the virtual machines as high maintenance which feeds back directly to the business, “they said it looks fine… but it’s still broken”.

It’s an interesting conversation and one that I had recently with an IT Director working outside London for a medium enterprise, he had recently turned around to his server guys and said, “Windows/Unix/VMware, I want you to learn all of them, they are all an operating system, a platform that needs to be supported”. “I wanted to remove any concept of alignment to a single platform, there will be people that are best skilled at Windows, Unix or VMware but I don’t want people getting too comfortable, I want to be able to call anyone at 3am, and know that they have enough basic skills for fault analysis” he said.

The team should be looking at our virtualization platform, they know our operational issues, I want a platform that is based on an ideal with a degree of understanding what the issues are and what we can realistically achieve.

I will keep in touch with Andy and note any improvements or changes going forward, how you deliver a service internally or externally can make a huge difference as to its success both within IT and to your end user community, remember it’s only one department, one guy that can change the perception of your service from fine to rubbish, and negativity can become a self fulfilling circle which feeds around your IT, your service and your business – IT is rubbish we’ll never get that working here, so they never try, what revenue or business loss could we be loosing as a result.

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