Why VIOPS?

This document explains the driving forces behind the VIOPS project and what it aims to achieve.

Many enterprises and mid-sized organizations have deployed VMware infrastructure on industry standard systems to significantly reduce hardware, data center, and operational costs--many report 70-80% cost savings, and 3-6 month ROI periods--while achieving significant gains in operational agility, efficiency, and availability.

Along the way to standardization on VMware infrastructure, users have requested help from VMware experts regarding integration of existing people, processes and technology to enable the management and day-to-day operations of their virtual infrastructure.

In response to this widespread demand amongst customers, VMware has created a comprehensive “Virtual Infrastructure Operations” Program that is aimed at helping customers develop the organizational mindshare, capabilities and skill sets required to assess, design, deploy, manage and scale their virtual infrastructure.

Customer Needs

All customers attempting to scale and standardize on virtual infrastructure (including ITIL and process-oriented customers) face typical challenges that come with the organizational, infrastructure and operational transformation required across the enterprise to achieve the full value of virtualization. These challenges, to name a few, include - having to work with multiple LOBs—each with own objectives and processes, integrating the silos that exist even within IT, managing cross-functional processes on the new infrastructure, meeting security requirements, achieving regulatory compliance and managing the daily changes to infrastructure etc.

From an operational process perspective, customers also need to understand how they can improve and better manage existing processes such as provisioning, chargeback, incident management, change management, back-ups and various other operational processes within the virtual infrastructure environment.

Finally, standardizing on Virtual infrastructure needs to be based on a phased and managed approach that focuses on incremental adoption All customers attempting to scale and standardize on virtual infrastructure (including ITIL and process-oriented customers) face typical challenges that come with the organizational, infrastructure and operational transformation required across the enterprise to achieve the full value of virtualization. These challenges, to name a few, include - having to work with multiple LOBs—each with own objectives and processes, integrating the silos that exist even within IT, managing cross-functional processes on the new infrastructure, meeting security requirements, achieving regulatory compliance and managing the daily changes to infrastructure etc.

From an operational process perspective, customers also need to understand how they can improve and better manage, managed scaling and phased implementation of the different virtualization solutions for server consolidation, availability and disaster recovery across the enterprise. VMware’s recommended approach ensures that organizations do not end up doing too much too soon or too little too late but instead chart a steady and managed course towards enterprise-wide standardization and higher levels of virtual maturity.

Program Objectives

VMware’s “Virtual Infrastructure Operations” Program was created to help customers in standardizing, scaling and operationalizing their virtual infrastructure while deriving greater business value from virtualization and achieving higher levels of virtual maturity. Following are the specific objectives of this program that touch all key (people, technology and process) aspects required to enable the organizational, infrastructural and operational transformation sought by our customers:

• Inform and Educate executives and senior managers responsible on how they can structure, align and guide their organization in planning, deploying and managing their virtual infrastructure and maximize the enterprise-wide benefits of virtualization
• Provide a Roadmap along with the requisite Tools and Services to design, configure, deploy and scale virtualization solutions in a phased manner and standardize the entire enterprise on Virtual Infrastructure
• Provide Operational Best Practice recommendations for key operational processes required to optimize the day-to-day operations required to manage the virtual infrastructure.
• Build a community of Virtual Infrastructure customers and provide them a central collaborative platform for discussing and sharing experiences, ideas and best practices based on their respective Virtual Infrastructure implementations for mutual benefit

Each of the program components are briefly described below:

Executive Round Table

The Executive Round Table is a program designed to enable key customer executives to participate in roundtable discussions fostering better understanding of the various people, technology and process requirements for operationalizing their Virtual Infrastructure. This Roundtable event provides target executives with an opportunity to meet with peer executives to discuss and share personal experiences, thoughts and plans on virtualization. This Round table also motivates executives to start thinking and planning the key strategic and tactical steps required to successfully deploy virtualization across their enterprise. Executives are also presented with the CIO Workbook (described below) which outlines operational recommendations regarding people, process and technology needed at both the executive and pass-down level to deploy Virtualization.

CIO Workbook

The CIO Workbook was specifically designed to enable executives develop a Virtual infrastructure operations plan including the key success factors to focus on as well as the pitfalls to avoid in order to successfully standardize and operationalize their virtual infrastructure environment. The CIO Workbook also outlines the most important things that VMware customers have done to successfully implement virtualization throughout their companies. The workbook covers numerous essential topics including how executives can set the vision, formulate an enterprise virtualization strategy, provide the executive sponsorship and passdown, mobilize teams, create a Virtualization Center of Excellence and other essential resources that will enable executives get a good grip and a head start on their enterprise virtualization initiatives.

Operational Readiness Services

VMware’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) offers a focused suite of services to enable you to systematically assess, plan, implement, integrate and standardize VMware Virtual Infrastructure in your enterprise.

Each specialist key process area represents thousands of hours of VMware consulting experience gathered across hundreds of customers around the world. Capabilities in each process area can be measured using the VMware Maturity Model (VMM).

The VMM provides a simple and effective benchmark to measure an enterprise’s virtual infrastructure maturity and was developed by VMware by combining CMMI and ITIL concepts with VMware’s expertise and experience in enabling customers successfully adopt and standardize on Virtual Infrastructure.

VMM is a measure of how stable, predictable and institutionalised a key process area is – the higher the rating, the more mature the capabilities; mature capabilities are required to support large virtual machine footprints and host critical business applications. Each incremental level of the VMM says that the enterprise is provisioning, consuming and managing VMware Virtual Infrastructure in an ever more mature (predictable and stable) manner.

The VMware Operational Framework was designed to ensure that your enterprise systematically achieves higher levels of Virtual Maturity while deriving progressive business value along the deployment curve until you reach the target state of enterprise-wide standardization and process optimization.

To help you plan for standardizing your enterprise on Virtual infrastructure, VMware PSO offers the an Operational Readiness Accelerator that will help you assess the current state of your VMware technology adoption plans and operational processes to help you define your target state and roadmap to mature VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

The following figure shows the entire portfolio of services offered by VMware PSO - services that help customers at different stages of adoption can leverage to get to their next stage of enterprise virtualization.

VI Ops Portal

‘VI Ops’ Portal is an online community site for VMware Infrastructure customers and is built on the Clearspace platform – the same platform on which communities.vmware.com has been built. The VI Ops Portal was built to provide VMware’s customers a central collaborative platform for discussing and sharing, for mutual benefit, the ideas, experiences, and best practices based on their respective Virtual Infrastructure implementations.

VI Ops portal also provides a great source for customers to share best practices and related resources especially in the area of ‘operational processes’ required for managing the day-to-day operations of the Virtual Infrastructure. Customers using VI ops can learn how to view, create and save their own operational processes for planning, designing, deploying and managing Virtual infrastructure. They can also use existing Operational Processes submitted by customers who use VMware in their enterprises or share individual resources such as scripts, papers, tools with the community.

The site is also well-organized to cater to the needs of different customer profiles depending whether they are “learners”, “users” or “experts” or by title whether they are administrators, system architects, IT managers, IT planners, finance managers, etc. thus giving every user a structured and personalized facility to engage with the right level of operational content and community interactions..

Conclusion

VMware’s “Virtual Infrastructure Operations” Program was created to help customers standardize, scale and operationalize their virtual infrastructure while deriving greater business value from virtualization and achieving higher levels of virtual maturity. This program is built upon VMware’s expertise in virtualization technology and experience helping thousands of customers deploy and operationalize virtual infrastructure in a systematic, effective and predictable manner.

This program provides our customers with a complete VI Operations Package that ‘s based on a structured VI Operations Framework and includes a Collaborative Community Platform, Customer interaction Events, Executive Workbooks and a focused set of technology deployment and process optimization services to ensure successful VI operationalization for even the most demanding customer environments.