Be careful, they say, what you wish for. Most organizations have at last bought into the promise of near-fully virtualized enterprise data centers. And, in the long run, that’s unquestionably a good thing. After all, virtualizing your data center offers a variety of potential benefits from reduced upfront capital to lower operating costs. Yet a whole host of complexities – not the least of which of those is exacerbated by the diverse group of virtualization rivals vying for a place in your data center – has made the challenges of installing and configuring a virtual environment daunting.

For instance, as organizations have begun consolidating their physical number of servers, pushing the envelope and becoming more and more virtualized, solving yesterday’s challenges has created newer and bigger ones. One, of course, is a lack of standards around virtualization. If IT is mandated with building a private cloud, more often than not it finds itself buying, for instance, servers, storage, network infrastructure, VMware, hypervisor and management tools from a highly qualified but disparate group of vendors and then left to do all the heavy lifting required to sew everything together.

Standards? What standards? [Read more...]