Virtualization and automation are changing the way you do business and the way IT works in your company! If you are an ITIL professional and ignoring this space you could be in serious trouble! 

The global senior IT leaders I've met with recently - from both the public and private sectors - have confirmed that virtualization of their Intel server environments is now "business as usual." Most of the organizations identified virtualization of between 40% and 80% of their Intel environments and rapid transition to automating as much of their estate as possible. 

These reports have been further confirmed at other industry conferences that I have attended, and the business reasons for doing so include reducing power consumption and data center floor space and, more importantly, delivering better elasticity and scalability to the business. Virtualization of your Intel servers is the first step. Applications and storage are the next frontiers, and they are being explored today. Coming quickly behind that will be desktops (more about Desktop virtualization in the near future). Virtualization must be business as usual in the data center and is the thin edge of the wedge as cloud - both public and private - will rapidly follow.

Now there are multiple issues here for IT to consider, including managing compliance, configuration management, capacity, reclaiming of unused images and so on.

Recently I heard a horror story about a large government organization that had consolidated multiple data centers and virtualized 2,000 physical Intel servers down to 250 to deliver processing.  This was a great rationalization allowing them to close one site and reduce their support staff, but soon they discovered that the numbers of virtual environments were exceeding 2,250. As a result, they began recruiting staff to help manage virtualization, but couldn't reasonably attribute costs to justify operational expenditures, nor did the business have any visibility into the impact of virtualization. Their VM images were sprawling over the estate, and they had multiple instances that were either not being utilized, were poorly managed or were experiencing explosive growth. It didn't matter when they were audited for software compliance; they were accountable for the compliance situation.

My coaching here is that ITSM must be implemented, and you must adjust your processes for the changing world. The process that requires immediate focus is change management: to record the changes that are going on in your environment that is supported with automation (once approved) of the image, and don't forget to have an end date and\or criteria for taking the VM back into the pool. 

One great example I experienced recently happened in the financial sector. IT automatically measures CPU load and transaction throughput, and from experience they know that at the end of the month load will increase and then subsequently decrease the next week. IT monitors the load and when metrics are experienced that identify capacity issues, the event automatically raises a change which is approved and provisioned automatically and then brought into the pool.  The user community is notified as part of the process, and the additional provisioned environment has costs associated with it which are communicated to the business unit.  The real winner here for all concerned is that once the load reduces after the first of the month, the environment is reclaimed and can be used elsewhere in the estate.

This is just one example of many. 

Virtualization is only just beginning - if you have not transitioned your processes to support it, I suspect it is happening without your knowledge.  Remember ITIL is a framework: You configure it to your business requirements. Are you?