As a data center executive or operational manager you have successfully started and completed your first phase of virtualization and are possibly planning your next deployment. You have quickly and fairly easily taken your virtual footprint from 0% to 20%+. You have met your 2010 objectives, got paid on your MBO’s and have been showcasing your success internally and externally. And at the same time you are planning for the next phases in 2011 and 2012.

With the low hanging fruit gone, the next steps are not so obvious. The ROI is not so clear, and you are also looking outside the realm of your IT world – specifically the services and resources of the business – as the next candidates for virtualization. Will the business units be skeptical about your proposals and challenge your metrics against their reality?

As you plan for your next phase of virtualization, this will be foremost in your mind. As the IT leader you will want to take your team along a virtualization journey to the cloud, deliver value to your business customers in terms of business agility and validate each step of this process. You will face some challenges to this part of the virtualization process. The business will want to see that this is more than an “IT project”, and you will have to meet the business needs as you virtualize.

As you make you way along the next step in the virtualization process, you will need a different focus to your preparation that the previous phase. Then, you were focused on IT Cost Efficiency. You have proved the value of the technology, shown value to the CIO by reducing IT Capex and Opex. To move through the next phase of your virtualization journey, I would advocate a couple of steps to ensure success.

First, take a real-time accurate baseline on where you are at right now. This should include the current virtualization infrastructure as well as the physical IT assets you have. Look at the questions that this baseline will throw out. How optimized is my current infrastructure? What is the utilization on the virtualization already deployed? Where is my stranded capacity? How can I get 25% to 35% more out of this existing investment?

Second, moving beyond the virtualization of IT assets will demand business impact and financial data for the business owners of your next candidates. This will require the ability to demonstrate that your virtualization solution has the management capability to deal with application availability and reliability, scalability, capacity aware, and responsiveness to business changes – business agility. This is more than just a simple cost ROI, and will require you and your virtualization partner to prove the reliability and scalability of the cloud/ virtualization solution for critical apps. You will need to be prepared to do a PoC , to “sell “ internally as well as have some external peer references to show your business colleagues.

Third, gain real time visibility and holistic view of data center performance. Look at empirical data -- not just about cost but also more holistically about application performance in the virtualized environment to evaluate stability, flexibility and reliability. Business owners will be looking for assurance that this platform will meet the needs of their business. For a business user to virtualize their application they will need to see a full view of the data center performance. Critical to them will be capacity to deal with business growth and demand peaks. They will also want to see a seamless DR capability as well as performance – e.g. how many compute cycles per watt are your achieving

Approach the business user with a service or application that you want him/her to take into your new virtual environment. Show that business user the current cost and performance of that app in the current physical environment. Then simulate these cost and performance metrics in a virtual infrastructure clearly showing the benefits to the business line. Leave cost last and focus on scalability (capacity) and reliability (past performance). Then present the new lower costs.

To move you organization along the virtualization journey you will need to baseline where you are now, from a cost and performance perspective. Maximize the performance of your current virtual infrastructure. This will be your sales tool/demo to get the business users excited to move apps to this environment. Look at flexibility, look at reliability. Think service, think application. This will get your business partners working with you to drive virtualization further into the data center.