Seabreeze Virtualization Adoption: Case Study

Seabreeze Virtualization Adoption Plan
Executive Summary: This document lays out a plan to virtualize the city of Seabreeze server infrastructure as a method of reducing costs in light of recent budgetary issues. It addresses barriers to adoption such as resources, knowledge, maintenance, and finances. It discusses the virtualization technology and barriers to implementing it as well as how to overcome them. Leadership buy-in will be critical so the paper will discuss ways to encourage them to support the project. Finally, the paper discusses the end user and how virtualization will affect them as well as how to deal with potential resistance to this adoption. The final recommendation of the paper is the virtualization of the city’s server
Virtualization isn’t a cheap technology. It requires additional licensing and, assuming it is not done in-house, additional staff, and in some cases additional hardware. VMWare licensing, according to the company’s website, can be as much as $3495 per processor (vSphere, n.d.). And since many servers have multiple processors so it is easy to see the costs becoming unmanageable. This is not an insurmountable problem. If a staged approach is taken, the problem can be solved by slices. In the first year where servers are slated to be life-cycled, instead of purchasing one for one replacements Seabreeze would purchase one virtual server and move relevant servers to the host. Each cycle, a new slice of the environment is replaced by a virtual host until every machine to be virtualized is
Given time, it will become as ubiquitous as ‘Windows’, ‘iPhone’, and ‘JPEG’. The challenge is to convince those who make the decisions to understand that virtualization is a great option to reduce costs and improve efficiency. As stated above, virtualization has the potential to drastically reduce overhead for operating the city’s IT infrastructure. Considering the city is under a spotlight with respect to government spending, saving the city 90% of its IT infrastructure operating costs is a big deal. It also means, potentially, reducing staff as it takes fewer technicians to service 7-10 servers than it does to service 72+. Virtualization also provides the ability to quickly setup lab environments with which to test new initiatives in a safe setting. If the project does not pan out, simply recycle the virtual machines. Once decision makers understand all the benefits that come with virtualization and how the various barriers mention can be dealt with, any reservations should be resolved. One method to achieve this would be holding a ‘Virtualization Introduction’ seminar for the decision makers with some visual aids that will give the city’s leaders a clearer understanding of the benefits as well. The city has not virtualized its infrastructure. But, considering that the need to save money isn’t going away any time soon, it seems prudent to move forward sooner rather than