Me being a virtualization consultant, I keep getting the asked the question of "what should be my strategy for virtualization adoption?". It is obvious for the top management to adopt Virtualization for obvious cost reasons, and these are my thoughts:
Take the first steps of adopting virtualization for all new projects and converting low-risk physical servers (like FTP servers) into VMs.
- Process changes & convincing mid-management to think of "VMs" instead of physical servers while requesting for new server platforms
- Build IT SLAs around VMs instead of physical servers
- Internal education of virtualization & VMs for application teams - incentivate them by passing on the cost savings
- Process setup to migrate physical servers into VMs
- Any other financial aspects involved while converting physical assets into shared virtual assets
- Setting up cost sharing model to share server costs across business units, based on VM usage