Mike D’s Blog

There was a very interesting post over at VMHero a couple of days ago about creating an internal training course for users of virtualization. This wasn’t to train the people running the datacenter but rather all of the other people that had systems running on the virtual platform. I know this happens in some of the larger accounts I’ve dealt with but it’s a rarity. It’s good to see the topic come back up again.

So what kinds of things would you put in a training course for your employees and who would you give the course to? Personally I would start with the low hanging fruit.

Internal application developers are usually one of the first people to question running in a virtual machine. There’s a perceived performance problem with VMs. Sometimes they are scared that their app may not get the full resources of the server and this might cause problems. This is actually one of the most common myths in virtualization. For training I would walk these people through how VMs get scheduled. I would show them how quickly you can increase vCPU or memory counts in the VM as compared to physical systems. I would show them the power of snapshots. If you’re advanced enough to be using VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager then you could talk about how to use these technologies. The app teams can be your greatest allies but often virtualization looks just like a firewall to them – a black box sitting in the middle of their application.

The other group that can usually use a little education is the line of business (LOBs) owners. They are usually concerned with how quick you can respond to a request for resources. They are also concerned with the availability of their applications. You might want to walk these people through technologies like VMware DRS to show them how you can guarantee resources for their applications across a pool of hardware – something you couldn’t do in the physical world. You also might want to talk to them about VMware HA and show them how you can actually protect more of their applications for a lower cost then you could in the physical environment.

It should be interesting to see if VMHero comes back with the details on the 101 and advanced level course. If not, just taking the two cases above and developing some content around them can usually help to ensure the success of your virtualization project.