How To Build A Virtualization Practice

A solid hardware foundation, customers who use servers and a couple of smart engineers are about all it seems to take for a solution provider looking to add server virtualization to its offerings.

That, plus a quick call to one of the server virtualization vendors, all of which are looking to recruit partners both large and small.

No one can use a lack of a market as an excuse for not plunging feet-first into server virtualization. Indeed, this is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry.

IDC estimated that the number of virtual servers deployed will rise 40.6 percent annually through 2010, with the result that 1.7 million physical servers will be shipped to virtualize 7.9 million logical servers.

While the market is still young and far from saturated, that is no reason to hesitate. Opportunities are available today to help customers virtualize their server infrastructures in order to cut the number of servers they require, and with it the management headaches, power costs and cooling costs associated with server sprawl.

GETTING STARTED
Before anything else, a solution provider needs to get interested in server virtualization, a step that as often as not comes from customers pushing their partners into the market.

That is what happened to Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland-based storage solution provider that recently signed with VMware. "All our storage customers are implementing server virtualization," he says. "We had to get into server virtualization to support our customers."

For another solution provider, server virtualization was the way to reinvent itself to meet changing business requirements. Virtual Technologies was born from another solution provider, Client Systems, which is the last authorized distributor for the HP3000 series of midrange servers, says Dave Spears, vice president and general manager of the Denver-based solution provider, which started with virtualization about six months ago.

Spears says with the winding down of the HP3000, his company asked itself what it should do next. With a bit of luck, it managed to acquire the domain name www.virtualtechnologies.com, and a new server virtualization solution provider was born, he says.

Consiliant Technologies, Irvine, Calif., felt market pressure to get into server virtualization, says Joe Kadlec, vice president and senior partner. "We needed to get into virtualization," he says. "A lot of our competitors have already done it."

Jeremy Bridgman, systems group associate at Quantum Data Systems, a Bakersfield, Calif.-based solution provider, signed up with VMware recently specifically to help a particular customer.

"We had an opportunity to serve a client whose strategy in 2008 is to consolidate their servers and connect them to a SAN," Bridgman says. "So to serve the customer, we took VMware's online course for two days. We were probably going to do it soon anyway because it's a powerful product."

Next: Are You Qualified?