Administration model in the virtual datacenter

Allen Stewart, Principal Program Manager of Windows Server Division at Microsoft, wrote a short but interesting piece on one serious problem companies embracing virtualization have to face: change of IT administration model.

…there does not seem to be a consistent model some companies have taken the approach of keeping things the same way as the physical environment, others have created a virtualization group and assigned them the task of managing the virtual world.

So in the centralized approach Tier 1 and Tier 2 have complete rights to the environment and handle activities like VM creation from templates, deleting VM’S, starting/stopping, workload migration. The Engineering team handles, virtualization product evaluation, environment build out, creating standard VM builds/templates.

Certain environments like branch offices and test/dev labs may dedicate a different model where Virtualization tasks and activities are delegated to business units or IT in branch offices…

Read the whole article at source.