More than ever companies are looking for ways to improve. If you're not they you are doing your clients or your company a disservice. I challenge you on this, let virtualization change you. I remember being a jr sys admin and having to try and restore our Exchange 5 server by myself with my boss out of town. I was scared out of my mind. It took me all weekend but I figured it out, waited for the tapes to catalog, then restore, then replay the database.
That all seems so foreign to me know. Virtualization has changed the life of an IT consultant/manager. Don't get me wrong you can still screw up big time, but recovery (in a well managed environment) has become something that should breed confidence in a job well-done. The flexibility afforded to IT folks by virtual machines means the hardware and services offered to your users are moving farther apart. "The server is down." excuse doesn't fly in a virtualized enterprise. If the "Server is down" then you drag and drop to get it up again. Every key area that used to be filled with excuses when things went wrong has been improved in a virtualized environment:
- backups
- disaster recovery
- number of servers needed
- cost
- adminstration
- uptime
- performance
Nothing replaces the good IT consultant/manager. There isn't one thing that can make a bad IT consultant/manager good either. Virtualization either makes the good ones look even better or helps the bad ones continue to look bad.
