Introduction

Securing executive and management support, and the support of other teams in your organization, is critical to any virtualization project. A key tool in this critical process is the business case.

Extending and building upon the financial justification, this is the key process and document that will summarize the key benefits, costs and approach of your solution to secure the funding and support required for the next design steps.

Tens of thousands of VMware customers have been through this process before and established this business case and continue to evolve it as they become better and better at server consolidation and eliminate capital and operational expenditure from their budget, as well as releasing datacenter space and increasing project throughput by up to eight times.

Intended Audience

VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and VMware Architects (VCDX), and the management and finance teams who will support and fund the virtualization project.

Outline

The activities in a deployment are grouped by stages, though the stages do overlap to some degree and are not completely linear.

1. Problem - What is the business problem to be resolved? (may be more than one!)

2. Solutions - What are the options being considered, and what is the recommended option?

3. Justification - High Level Summary of the financial justification - for this include data from The specified document was not found.

4. Objectives - High level Overview of the objectives and the proposed approach

5. Costs - including the Budget estimate

6. Benefits - Expected business outcome and summary of key deliverables

7. Known Risks - and proposed management of risks

8. Plan - High Level Work Breakdown Structure and Proposed Timescales - this can be achieved in 180 days but you can be more or less aggressive dependant on your constraints and considerations

1. Problem

What is the business problem to be resolved? (may be more than one!)

• Datacenter space is running out, network ports are running out, projects are piling up at the door, business is going crazy because we in IT are too slow to respond (because of the IT issues we have).

• Business revenue is down and we need to eliminate capital and operational costs within twelve months - the target is to reduce the existing budgeted capital spend by 30% and identify Operational efficiencies to increase the project throughput - so if we keep the same OpEx but increase throughput, that is good.

• The root cause of this problem is over-deployed and under-utilized x86 servers in our datacenters.

• We have about 100 out-of-support servers that are still running business critical applications but we cannot afford a technology refresh, and in some cases we are not confident that the old applications will run on the latest hardware.

• We have another 100 under utilized servers that, according to our inconsistent and incomplete monitoring data, shows they use approximately 10% of available CPU, no more than 512MB RAM (out of 2GB), and no more than 20GB of local disk (out of 140GB). There are about 20/30 exceptions to this where servers are heavily utilized, but our data is incomplete and this is an estimate.

• We have projects piling up at IT's door that cannot be deployed because they require a minimum of three servers each (test, stage, prod) and most require more than that (typical number of servers required for an average project is ten). We have ten projects on hold that are critical to supporting our new product lines, and in this financial climate delaying time to market is not good for the future of our business. How do we get those projects deployed in a full datacenter?

• An additional problem is the way we work - our silo'd approach to IT has "evolved" over time so that we have specialist knowledge functions that don't seem to fit well into a process of delivering and maintaining IT in support of the business. For example, our process for deploying a new server takes ninety days and has too many variations producing servers that are usually not fit for purpose, either over/under engineered, and are always delivered late.

In summary, we need to reduce costs and increase productivity within twelve months.

2. Solutions

The solutions to the root cause of the two problems (datacenter space and working practices) are as follows:

1. Build a new greenfield datacenter and deploy a new team there with new working practices.
   
   This has been rejected because it increases costs and will take more than twelve months.

2. Do application consolidation, such as databases.
   
   This has been rejected as the only solution because it only addresses about 10% of our server estate and would not deliver the cost savings, not the changes in working practices.

3. Use a server virtualization product to consolidate physical servers into a smaller footprint and introduce more efficient working practices.
   
   This has been selected as the preferred choice because it has been proven at other organizations to deliver the financial and efficiency benefits in within twelve months.

The final choice of solution is virtualization from one of the leading vendors and working with our partners. The vendor and partner selection process is a subsequent step to the business case.

3. Justification

High Level Summary of the financial justification - for this include data from The specified document was not found.

• Save $x in twelve months

• It is possible to virtualize 100 existing servers by a method known as Physical-to-Virtual (P2V), and it is expected that at least 80% of our servers (80) can be virtualized. Because we have to refresh this hardware anyway, this means we can avoid purchasing between 80-100 servers.

• Instead of virtualization the 80-100 servers, if we can get a consolidation ratio (number of virtual machines to physical hosts running VMware) of 10:1 it means we only need to buy 8-10 physical servers.

• The hosts required to run ESX might be blades or rack-mounted, it depends on the proof of concept, and would cost roughly $x each all in at a total cost of $x maximum for ten hosts.

• The cost of 100 hosts, if we were to refresh instead of virtualize, would be $x

• The benefit in capital cost avoidance of virtualizing is $x

• There are currently eight business critical projects requiring nearly 100 servers to support applications like ERP for Finance and CRM for Sales.

• The cost of failed processes from order-to-cash meant $10M missed revenue in Q1

• The cost of inefficient sales process has caused delayed orders of $15M in Q1

• The amount of downtime caused by unplanned downtime (e.g. old hardware failing) and unplanned maintenance (unauthorized changes) has pushed availability down to 78%.

• The benefit in operational efficiences will avoid missed revenue and delayed orders adding up to $25M in Q1

4. Objectives

High level Overview of the objectives and the proposed approach

The objectives of the VI3 Deployment are:

• Build a proof of concept to prove the VMware technology in our environment

• Run a Capacity Planner process to fix the holes in our monitoring data and provide detailed server statistics over a four week period to allow us to identify candidates for virtualization

• Build and test the physical-to-virtual migration process to prove that it works in our environment

• Ensure the design is fit-for-purpose, in that it captures industry best practice and is NOT over- or under-engineered

• Ensure that the VI3 deployment has the capacity for 250 of our servers, as shown by the Capacity Planner data

• Prove that there are robust operational procedures in place for our IT Ops staff before go-live, including integration with our CMDB, our change management process, and that adequate fault isolation and root cause analysis procedures are in place.

• Provide a read-only dashboard and reporting for access by anyone in the organization to provide live status and news about the new platform.

• Provide an internal knowledge management space about the new platform.

• Create awareness for all internal employees about the new platform.

• Provide adequate training for IT staff to design, deploy and manage VI3.

• Be a live platform running around 100 virtual machines from P2V and a 100 from new projects.

5. Costs

Costs including the Budget estimate. Costs are detailed in The specified document was not found. and Bill of Materials (link).

The main costs are:

• Hardware - $x

• Sofware - $x

• Consulting partner - $x

• Disposable of old hardware - $x

6. Benefits

Benefits - Expected business outcome and summary of key deliverables

There are two key benefits.

1. The first benefit is purely cost avoidance by consolidating existing hardware into virtual machines means avoiding a costly 100 server tech refresh. We also avoid buying another 100 servers that are required for future projects.

2. The ability to now deliver the ERP and CRM applications because of virtualization means we process $25M more business that was missed in Q1.

7. Risks

Known Risks and proposed management

8. Plan

High Level Work Breakdown Structure and Proposed Timescales - this can be achieved in 180 days but you can be more or less aggressive dependant on your constraints and considerations.

There are four phases of an estimated six weeks duration each, though there is time-linear overlap betweensome activities where some next stage activities start before all of the activities of a previous stage are complete. The list is in roughly time order and logical sequence.

The resources required to execute this project already exist in-house but require expert assistance from a preferred consulting partner. This help should take no more than 6 weeks and starts in the design stage where we can use 3 weeks of thelp, and the implementation phase where we use another 3 weeks of help.