Reality check for virtualisation

Business use of virtual desktop PCs is being held back by a lack of skills

Deployments of virtual desktop PCs and servers are being held up by a lack of appropriate engineering skills, according to a survey published yesterday.

Research conducted by Coleman Parkes on behalf of IT consultants Avanade, indicates that 53 percent of British businesses are unable to implement desktop and server virtualisation due to a lack of relevant expertise.

Avanade director of enterprise service solutions, Brent Kronenberg, believes that companies readily identify the cost and efficiency benefits that running virtual desktop and servers can provide, but often fail to assess the difficulty of implementing and managing virtual machines (VMs) in complex environments.

“It is a can learn technology but there is a lack of formalisation around it and companies still have to do some planning: technicians do not necessarily have the skills at the architectural level,” he said.

Of the 102 UK IT infrastructure and operations managers surveyed, all of whom worked for companies employing over 10,000 employees, 28 percent said they were interested in desktop virtualisation, though the majority had only reached the development and testing stage.

Xen virtualisation was introduced into version 5 of Red Hat’s enterprise Linux desktop product (RHEL) in March this year.

Given the short timeframe, the company has no hard figures on how many users have upgraded from RHEL 4, or how many of those have actively deployed the necessary Xen hypervisor.

But ‘anecdotal evidence’ suggests 80 per cent were evaluating desktop virtualisation, the open source company said.

“Virtualisation is [relatively] new to x86 architecture and people starting to look at deploying it may not have the hypervisor or storage expertise,” conceded Red Hat executive vice president of engineering Paul Cormier.