Official Unofficial 2012 VMware Storage Survey–What holds you back…

The best parts of the Official Unofficial 2012 VMware Storage Survey are the open ended questions – some of the things people put in there are really interesting, funny, eye-opening, heck sometimes offensive :-)

The third open-ended question in the 2012 survey was “What are the 1 or 2 things holding you back from where you need to get to in your shop?” – and indeed – I got hundreds of examples.  If the “what are you doing that’s cool?” was inspiring – this was a bit depressing.   There were 3 answers that came up over and over again: 1) Budget; 2) Time; 3) Boss/Management.  

Budget, Time – hey, I get that.  And sometimes the boss is right.   But – more often than that – bureaucrats get in the way of innovation.   Read “Tribes” – find a way to break through folks – don’t let people who don’t get it, get in your way…

Read on past the break and judge for yourself…

“What are the 1 or 2 things holding you back from where you need to get to in your shop?”:

• $
• $ $$
• $$
• $$ and time
• $$$
• $$$$
• $$$$ and time.
• $$$$$$
• $$$$$$$
• $$$, time, and $$$
• $$s, why is Isilon so much more expensive now EMC owns them?
• $'s - storage and VMware licensing costs
• $, time
• $/GB and software licensing
• $/TB
• (lack of) automated compliance and product knowledge/experience
• * Troubleshooting VM performance issues * Getting P-A-Y-G/chargeback up and running internally
• * bureaucracy * cost
• - Money - Dealing with the corporate moroons who don't like new age.
• - Storage prices - Lack of knowledge from the border
• - better control over LAN - better security infrastructure
• - time lines on other projects
• -Cost of storage -Lack of resorces generally
• -money
• 1) Availability 2) Budget
• 1) Politics (Global) 2) Budget
• 1) good sales & marketing material 2) training material/access
• 1) time 2) competent collegues to delegate to
• 1. Available Budget 2. Lack of vision of Management
• 1. $$$$$ 2. $$$$$$
• 1. Budget 2. Budget 3. See no 1 Actually time and trained resources also factor
• 1. Budget 2. Management
• 1. Budget 2. People married to certain brands, OPEN YOUR EYES, amazing stuff is out there
• 1. Budget - Need more money to get everything. 2. UPPER MANAGEMENT!!
• 1. Cost 2. Cost.
• 1. Cost of storage. 2. EMC Maintenance Contracts!!!! Knowing what needs to be renewed and when.
• 1. Costs of infrastructure 2. Costs when implementing VMware View (Microsoft licenses).
• 1. Knowing where the hell to go next! 2. Having the budget to spend on new "stuff".
• 1. Money 2. Time and/or Human Resource
• 1. Money 2. Time
• 1. Money. 2. Management willing to approve.
• 1. Politics. 2. Money.
• 1. bad service from emc support organisation 2. high costs
• 1. cost 2. service
• 1. money 2. money 3. time and money
• 1. resolving issues with backups. 2. budget.
• 10GIG and SOIC
• 10Gigabit/Converged Fabric adoption
• A lack of time due constant new ideas being worked out.
• A real SAN, I've now using a normal server as an iSCSI target, but I can't using it with SRM.
• A winning lotto ticket or an intern to offload all the paperwork.
• Ability to get out of fire fighting mode and into future projects
• Administrative backing for ideas
• Advanced features such as replication, snapshots, CLI, proper training
• Agility > not being able to move quickly to the next edge of tech... i HATE IT.
• Always budget
• Application Team buy in, OS team fiefdoms (physical world thinking)
• Application owners and lack of organizational enforcement.
• Approval, availability of hardware for testing
• Automation, there's company traction against it.
• Automation/Orchestration, resourcing and budget.
• Availability of modern storage at a price point that is economic for my business.
• Backup..trying to resolve with Avamar.
• Backups still slight sore point, manpower and ongoing consolidations.
• Bandwidth and cheap software
• Bandwidth costs (europe)
• Better ROI on hardware investments Clearer roadmap for the future so we know where to invest
• Better business better processes and getting application people on board.
• Better day-one support from my storage vendors.
• Better integration of storage and vmware teams - or let us manage our own arrays.
• Better servers and more RAM
• Better storage and buy in the from the business that I am saving them money.
• Better storage performance for virtualizing Tier 1 apps
• Bodies...I am the storage, server, monitoring, network engineer/admin..more than what i can do..
• Boss and budget
• Budget
• Budget Appetite for risk
• Budget Change Management.
• Budget Management
• Budget Skills
• Budget Stakeholder buy-in
• Budget Time
• Budget Time
• Budget Time
• Budget - Return on investment
• Budget ;-)
• Budget Constrants
• Budget and Budget
• Budget and FTE resources
• Budget and Mangement understand the fundamental importantance of the storage.
• Budget and Politics
• Budget and Time
• Budget and availability of storage and hardware.
• Budget and business interest.
• Budget and executive backing.
• Budget and long term planning
• Budget and management vision.
• Budget and not enough staff
• Budget and the anti-change brigade (that and training for internal support)
• Budget and time
• Budget and time to eval and investigate
• Budget and time to learn new products.
• Budget and time, probably just like everybody else.
• Budget cycles, budget itself, comfort level of management(although this is growing).
• Budget for 10G upgrade, and Budget for diversity of storage.
• Budget for shared storage in dev/test environments.
• Budget is my big one, as a self employed trainer it's pay mortgage or buy lab gear.
• Budget is the main issue!
• Budget primarily
• Budget restrictions
• Budget retraining within our company
• Budget!
• Budget! Always budget...
• Budget, Enterprise Plus is too expensive.
• Budget, lack of team members w virtualization experience
• Budget, time, staffing
• Budget.
• Budget.
• Budget. Anything EMC is expensive.
• Budget. :-)
• Budget. Deeper understanding from upper management.
• Budget... Always Budget! :)
• Budgets
• Budgets (want to get to 10GE)
• Budgets and deciding if vmware storage needs to be separate from corporation storage strategy.
• Budgets and decisionmaking. It all came to a grinding halt...
• Budgets and the fact that we have a change freeze window of 7 months per year.
• Budgets and upper management.
• Bugdet, Wife.. :)
• Bugs
• Bureaucracy.
• Bureaucracy. FUD.
• Business interference
• CAPEX and OPEX.
• CX4 closed system for monitoring and management.
• Can't think of anything right now
• Capacity ceilings
• Capacity issues and open source software replication issues(Gluster).
• Capacity planning still seems to be a black art ;-)
• Capital!
• Cash :)
• Cash and more cash
• Cashflow
• Celerra Replicator V2 performance issues Vmware VDR 2.0 lack of features
• Cleaning up some design flaws in the View 4.0 infrastructure.
• Clear up RecoverPoint and VMAX uses
• Client decision making abilities....
• Closer integration between storage and virtualization teams
• Communicating vision to management
• Communication with users and clients. Planning acurate capacity for future growth.
• Competing tasks
• Complex and diverse Storage Management Tools
• Connectivity between hardware, and reliability of VMware backup technologies.
• Convincing management to buy Enterprise Plus and other products like vCenter Operations and SRM.
• Convincing other departments to jump on the virtual band wagon.
• Cost
• Cost
• Cost & People resources
• Cost and Time
• Cost and cost
• Cost and headcount
• Cost and staff
• Cost for SSD and better auto-tiering
• Cost is biggest factor - we're a non-profit organization.
• Cost of SSD drives but that is going down.
• Cost of SSD storage.
• Cost of additional storage
• Cost of data protection and DR
• Cost of dev and testing on new sans.
• Cost of hardware
• Cost of larger DIMMs - 16GB DIMMs ae expensive. Cisco UCS, here we come.
• Cost of licenses
• Cost of shared storage.
• Cost of software and hardware to meet growth.
• Cost of storage
• Cost of storage Lack of easy migration path to newer/better products
• Cost of storage and licensing.
• Cost of storage which supports replication and time!
• Cost of storage. Difficulty in migrating between storage platforms.
• Cost of tools Complexity of implementing
• Cost, Storage life Cycle
• Cost, existing infrastructure and how to blend it in.
• Cost, resource (manpower)
• Cost, teams are in SILOs and working across teams can be difficult.
• Cost, training
• Cost.
• Cost. Workload.
• Cost. K-12 Public school funding sucks!
• Costs
• Costs - too expensive, especially for Russia :-(
• Costs and funding..
• Costs costs costs!
• Costs.
• Costs...
• Costs/Budget at customer
• Crisis.... Less budget
• Cross-team coordination.
• Current economic situation delaying projects!
• Currently, I need additional resources to build out my home environment/lab.
• Cycles
• DR
• DR funding!!!
• Decent capacity planning software and overall cross Hypervisor analysis/health view etc.
• Dedicating personal resources to virtualization.
• Dedupe. Having to use ZFS to get around this.
• Demand from internal customers, too much work not enough people!
• Dependability
• Different cloud models available. More study required before choosing any model.
• Documentation often contains conflicting advice.
• Don't know
• Drill down from top to bottom of the stack ...
• EMC and NetApp aren't giving away free demo storage arrays.
• EMC licensing %#%@#
• EMC not releasing software in a timely fashion
• EMC sales
• ESXi licensing, costly for small businesses to adopt.
• Ease of use and cheapness of unified storage
• Easy to configure storage that performs and doesn't require day to day babysitting
• Economic climate
• Economy
• Economy Customer lack of understanding/ trusting of virtualization/cloud
• Economy in general - the good hardware is expensive :)
• Economy, performance/features per cost
• Education, my job don't want to invest in advance educations.
• End to end reporting with performance, from disk io to service in a vm
• Enough storage. More 10Gb CNA network so that I can run FCoE or iSCSI or NAS for my storage
• Enough time.
• Executive buy-in....ROI for investments in SSD/Auto Tiering implementations.
• Executive decisions on spending.
• Exploding our VMware practice to the next level.
• FCoE adoption Storage availability between 2 sites Cost of storage creating silos
• Fair Disclosure: I work for an EMC Partner
• Faster bandwidth for storage fabric.
• Faster storage would be nice, cost prohibitive when balancing performance with capacity
• Fibre-Channel in a moderate price range for SMB
• Finance
• Finance Problems
• Finance manager approval.
• Finance/Prices.
• Finances are always the issue
• Financial constraints
• Financing, Systems Group
• From a customer perspective, conservatism and capex.
• Funding
• Funding for hardware to improve capabilities
• Funding from the top. Confidence in what we are trying to achieve (from the management).
• Funding, resources and time -- need more bodies or a different
• Funding.
• Funding. Staffing.
• Funds
• Funds Staff
• Funds and time
• Funds to replace existing SAN.
• Future proof vision from management, money, people ;).
• Getting Networking and Storage teams to be responsive quickly.
• Getting able to plan ahead. Getting comfortable enough to get ready to take calculated risks.
• Getting across the benefits that the technology can offer. Not just using the basic features.
• Getting hold of demo kit to PoC new projects.
• Getting junior techs to understand the complexity
• Getting the costs past the people who old the purse strings.
• Govt slowness, fear of change
• Hardware & Licensing Costs
• Hardware and $$. THAILAND FLOODING DISK COSTS!
• Hardware req's. Just in the testing phase and not looking to sink a fortune into hardware.
• Having the time to implement the cool things
• Having to use RDM for our oracle rac vm's
• Headcount, headcount, headcount...
• Hein ????
• High CAPEX for storage !
• Hitting the bandwidth limits of 1Gb ISCSI
• Hmmmm.... Hard to say. It depends.
• I don't know
• I don't understand the question !
• I don't work in an IT job anymore so getting an IT job.
• I feel like the cost of next gen flash based storage is the largest barrier right now.
• I wish i had a shop to play with.
• IBM hardware and incompetent vendors
• IP Mobility for streched DCs
• ITIL adoption has greatly slowed implementation of anything.
• Indentify ROI goals that are real and not marketing based.
• Infrastructure costs.
• Internal
• Internal Politics Staff resistant to change
• Internal processes and policies! :-) Not having enough manpower!
• Interoperability of various vendors components
• Just one thing - Resources. Specifically money, people, and time.
• Just the i/o on the storage, should be much more faster but have to save money
• Knowledge
• Knowledge, money.
• Lack of Budget :P
• Lack of Money
• Lack of budgetary funding internally. Difficult meeting ROI for smaller companies.
• Lack of direction and funding from upper management due to misunderstanding of the technologies.
• Lack of employee resource....too much to do, to little time.
• Lack of experience and education.
• Lack of good employees. Know anyone?
• Lack of interest in VDI implementations. Limited worst-case site recovery plans/funding.
• Lack of knowledge and drive-to-improve of other system engineers; bureaucracy
• Lack of resources in storage team. Not enough people.
• Lack of standards documentation within my customers environment.
• Lack of storage
• Lack of storage is always an issue and it comes down to money.
• Lack of time
• Lack of time (even though I work 70 hour a week)...
• Lack of understanding by management of what I actually do. :)
• Lack of virtualization knowledge amoung storage & network admins in my case.
• Layer two extensions between data enters!
• Less time to test and getting experience.
• Licencing cost of VDI is still to high and I want AppBlast now.
• Licensing
• Licensing costs
• Licensing costs of vmware and storage.
• Licensing costs.
• Licensing for mid small business
• Licensing structures and costs Interoperability chart (what works with what)
• Licensing w/ lack of money is our biggest hurdle right now.
• Licensing. Complication with Microsoft licensing and costs of Netapp licensing.
• Licensing/Oracle
• Limitations of data centre infrastructure.
• Limited budget
• Limited hardware support in VMware ESXi.
• Local Governement slowness.....
• MORE STORAGE flexibility/training.
• MOney.
• MS Licensing on View. Storage Costs.
• MSFT licensing on the desktop side.
• Mainly the cost of storage.
• Maintenance windows, equipment, licensing, undersized UPS, CRAC, no genset.
• Man power and number of hours in a day, which goes back to man power
• Management
• Management Budget
• Management visions... sad but true!
• Management :) We're not talking their language I'm afraid.
• Management and Orchestration solutions built in ready to go.
• Management and high initial costs.
• Management and management
• Management and money.
• Management approval, budget, silo-based mentality, regulations.
• Management can not decide what they want to do.
• Management fears over virtualizing business critical apps
• Management funding to expand our array with SSD tiers. Oh and FC or 10GbE.
• Management has a priority on stability, not innovation.
• Management i guess
• Management indecision.
• Management lock with a specific vendor instead of getting what is best for the job
• Management not understanding capacity requirements.
• Management team.
• Management understanding and lack of vision.
• Management understanding of technology, Budget, future vision is limited in management.
• Management with looser purse strings.
• Management!
• Management!
• Management, Lack of process.
• Management, and management
• Management.
• Management.
• Management. Inertia.
• Managers
• Manpower resources.
• Maturing our vSphere deployment.
• Maturity of vcloud director
• Microsoft licensing
• Mis-aligned VMDK's
• Missing storage performance tool.
• Money
• Money Management
• Money Money
• Money Time
• Money Management support
• Money & Time
• Money & time
• Money / politics
• Money allocated by Executive Mgmt
• Money and Money
• Money and Space
• Money and Time
• Money and Time :)
• Money and Time.
• Money and Time. But I think that's everyone's problem.
• Money and availability of human resources.
• Money and commitment from the customer.
• Money and figuring out what features we can't afford, but wan't/need
• Money and integration
• Money and leadership
• Money and licensing frustrations
• Money and more hardware
• Money and more money.
• Money and organizational drive
• Money and the learning curve.
• Money and the unwillingness to change from old system and human management styles.
• Money and time
• Money and time!
• Money and time.
• Money and time.
• Money and training
• Money as always.
• Money for storage array upgrade, for data deduplication and flash storage.
• Money money money.
• Money most of the time
• Money!
• Money! Time!
• Money, Time
• Money, always money! And time, of course! :)
• Money, and Time... always 2 things that hurt any shop.
• Money, and complete insight into what´s actually going on in the array/vmdk
• Money, and time (aka management support, and management support)
• Money, bureaucracy.
• Money, money and time.
• Money, money, money!
• Money, time
• Money, time to test new stuff.
• Money.
• Money.
• Money. :)
• Money. Storage is so expensive.
• Monitoring, reporting and capacity planning - open standards and interfaces.
• More fast storage and more cash. =)
• More funds for storage.
• More insight into the underlying hardware.
• More time - business adoption
• More time in the day and being able to clone myself.
• Most of my problem is our current hardware and time/money to do introduce new features.
• Mostly price, although the VNXe series has helped quite a bit on the low end.
• Move to FCoE, we need to make it soon. 1gig is not enough anymore.
• Moving mission critical infrastructure from old hosts to upgraded ones.
• Multi-tasking and reduced staffing.
• My Boss to Goto VMworld!
• My Manager
• My storage is IOPS starved
• N.A
• N/A
• N/A - work for an EMC and VMware partner.
• N/a
• NA
• NFS mount discrepencies. Vsphere 4.1 upgrades.
• NOT ENOUGH TIME
• Need SRM for a better DR plan!
• Need more $$$ and people
• Need/want appblast :)
• Network in Ireland - Using limited MPLS links so hampering VDI project to remote sites.
• New storage budget cost
• No
• No budget No management with vision
• No human resources for deploying vCloud Director (requires some customization work)
• No, separate storage box to test installations and perform risky tests.
• Non-tiering san, no SSD
• None
• None at this time
• None really
• Not decision maker, but more role on adviser and tester
• Not enough hours in the day to get it all done.
• Not having visibility into the storage environment (permissions/politics)
• Not much
• Not much :)
• Not sure.
• Nothing
• Nothing at the moment
• Nothing at this time
• Nothing currently
• Nothing much really, we are pretty much there.
• Nothing yet, we are in the middle of implementing the VNX and all good so far
• Nothing, our reach is limitless
• Nothing.
• Nothing....It''s all possible
• Off course money is the first, second is time
• Old dogs not wanting to learn new tricks
• Once we have new frames in here (2012), we will be in much better shape capability wise.
• Open source integration with VMware.
• Optimizing storage
• Oracle licensing issues
• Oracle+licensing is evil Hyper-V questions are showing up more and more frequently
• Other People
• Our DB a.
• Paperwork and funding
• Peer intelligence pulls me off infrastructure projects for daily fires. See above.
• People
• People and money
• People resources.
• People time.
• People unwilling to change.
• People with the wrong perception of virtualization, And 10gbe.
• Per socket licensing cost of VMWare and storage networking licenses.
• Perception and performance
• Personnel
• Personnel resources, we need more to move forward.
• Persuading others that NFS is not the way forward.
• Planning for appropriate amounts of IOPS in a highly cached environment
• Policies
• Political Silos
• Political Silos Absence of expertise Conservatism
• Political.
• Politics
• Politics and ignorance
• Politics and money
• Politics and money.
• Politics and upper management
• Politics, Lack of Management decisiveness
• Politics, Politics, Politics, Politics, and hmm, Politics.
• Politics, Time, Money
• Politics, antiquated ideals.
• Politics, red tape, and storage team not engaged with virtualization team.
• Politics.
• Poor Process Poor understanding of Cloud/Virt by sales
• Poor storage
• Price
• Price Moving to external IAAS but offerings are lacking in quality
• Price - Performance
• Price :(
• Price and time
• Price, ROI
• Price, price
• Price. Time. Knowledge.
• Prices
• Prices on enterprise SSD
• Prices, interoperability and support matrixes (this last one is just a nightmare).
• Pricing
• Pricing Moving to external iaas to eventually replace internal iaas
• Procedures and management.
• Process / operating model... nothing technical really.
• Process, people, process.
• Procurement process internally (this year...)
• ROI
• Red Tape
• Red tape Managements outdated perception of technology
• Red tape, expertise/training (or finding the time to get trained up)
• Replication
• Resources and CAPEX
• Resources and resources.
• Resources for testing configurations on
• Resources. Buy-in.
• Resources: time and money.
• SAN
• SAN Storage costs
• SAN storage, log review and file change auditing on the ESXi hosts.
• SLA's for the VDI environment and getting time in the Lab environment.
• SQL server virtualisation Proving consistence performance
• SRM integration within a cluster
• SRM support with DataCore
• SRM upgrade, planing and understanding the changes, is holding back esx 5 upgrade
• SRM, Money
• SSD Cost microsoft desktop licensing costs
• SSD Cost, power consumption
• SSD as a tier is $$$
• SSD prices, ala carte software features and pricing
• Scalability!
• Scheduling Downtime
• Security
• See 16. Storage innovations that support efficient geo options.
• See above
• See question 16.
• Senior management.
• Shared storage for our other data center
• Simple fast backup of vm's that is cost effective
• Simpler i/O bandwidth increases. Proprietary solutions from third parties are a no go.
• Slow disk performance
• Snapshot consolidation
• Software incompatibility and/or software vendors won't support virtualized applications
• Software support from third party vendors...
• Solid networking
• Some more experience in networking and time to accomplish my experiments.
• Sorry, I don't fully understand the question.
• Space reclaimation
• Space. I could do so many things if I had more storage capacity.
• Speed of delivery and money.
• Spindles, faster disks
• Staff resourcing
• Staff time/skill
• Staffing and expertise
• Storage + License prices + my boss
• Storage Capacity
• Storage Costs. Management Turf Battles.
• Storage Dollars
• Storage Virtualization
• Storage and Storage
• Storage and VMware licensing cost. Enterprise management feature cost.
• Storage and budget
• Storage and money!
• Storage and vmware price
• Storage capacities for the same cost are growing, IOPS are not.
• Storage complexity and money..
• Storage costs
• Storage costs, VMWare license costs
• Storage management.
• Storage maxed out P2V conversion due app issues
• Storage performance, budget, left picking up seconds from ebay just to cut the mustard
• Storage prices and 10gb network pricing
• Storage prices and licensing costs
• Storage prices.
• Storage pricing, Storage pricing, and bloody Storage pricing.
• Storage size, old equipment, not moving to 10Gb everywhere.
• Storage training....needed...
• Storage.
• Streched clusters
• Support Quality
• Support, support
• Tco proof
• Testing Equipment, Time
• Testing and operational hazzards
• The Cost of bandwith to remote offices of datacenters
• The Storage vs Vmware team problem
• The blindness VMware creates with VMFS. We want visibility on array and SAN!
• The budget. Financial institution internal and external regulations.
• The change in product consolidation between vSphere 4.1 products and 5.0 versions
• The clients desires.
• The cost of VMware vSphere 5. Definitely prohibitive.
• The cost of storage and the inability to add to our existing storage frames.
• The cost of storage is the biggest thing.
• The main thing is $$$.
• The new SAN from EMC..
• The one thing we can't buy; time.
• The price of FAST VP
• Time
• Time
• Time & Money
• Time & People
• Time & manpower, then money...likely not much you can do about those though...
• Time - Time to test new features out that will ironically save us time in the feature.
• Time / Money
• Time and $$
• Time and Budget
• Time and Money
• Time and Money LOL
• Time and Money!
• Time and Resources
• Time and a plan from mgmnt.
• Time and buy in
• Time and expertise
• Time and internal skill sets or lack thereof
• Time and machines to test new things and solutions
• Time and money
• Time and money!
• Time and money. The two things everyone wants more of and never has enough of.
• Time and more people with the knowledge (working on the second)
• Time and personnel resource!
• Time and resources.
• Time and skilled+experienced staff to assist
• Time and willingness to take risk (read enter into the unknown) customers are still very naive.
• Time is the only issue. We've got the assets to create all the services I want.
• Time to get it all done.
• Time to learn how to best implement products and then get them implemented.
• Time!
• Time, I don't have enough of it.
• Time, Time
• Time, Time, Money.
• Time, Time, Time ...
• Time, Time, to less manpower
• Time, and resources
• Time, appropriate test facilities
• Time, cost of storage
• Time, money, politics.
• Time, resource and cost of implementation and migration.
• Time, resources and budget
• Time.
• Time. Time. Time. And a bit of money for storage.
• Time. And time.
• Time. Any idea when 36 hour days will show up?
• Time. Budget contraints.
• Time. Cloud moves slowly.
• Time. Sales people.
• Time. There is never enough time to monitor our infrastructure and then install new equipment.
• Times to play with all the features
• Too many choices in the marketplace, takes time to do real evaluation.
• Too many projects.
• Training
• Training and product standardization
• Training and resources
• Training!
• Training, time.
• UIM
• Unclear SSD roadmap
• Upgrades to esx 4.1
• User and management reluctance to go into cloud.
• Usual story...money and lack of buy in to virtualize large servers/applications.
• VAAI
• VDI bandwidth limitations
• VDI, storage replication & networking
• VMware FT between sites and between arrays.
• VMware backup (currently using Veeam) is not quite as straightforward/polished as I would like.
• VMware new licensing
• VNX bugs, lack of full! UNMAP support from VMWARE/storage venders in vSphere 5
• VPlex Geo over 11ms.
• Vast adoption of FCoE.
• Vendor beaurocracy.
• Vendor olympics and RFI/Ps
• Viability of stable shared storage.
• Vision and commitment, to stand up and plot a direction
• Vision/Focus from upper level mgmt Time
• WAN pipe size
• We could oversubsrcipe heavily if storage reclamation was made much easyier or even automatic.
• We have 1 in house, trying to get one for a lab
• We have a vision, the two things holding us back at the moment are "dollers and time"
• We need SRM, too bad about the price setting. Budget constraints ...
• We need time and magic!
• We'd like to add 40TB of shared storage and it's about$20K too much IMHO.
• Work in Russia
• Working around VNX NAS limitations 1000v working correctly
• Would like to get VMware Operation manager, and Capacity IQ
• Wouldn't know.
• a MSDN like license model to try the procuct for up to a year
• a decent internal roadmap
• always cost and time
• applications not "supporting" virtualisation, application people still don't get it
• bad management of the storage infrastructure by the Unix team
• block storage for tier 1 apps that performs well and is easy to use.
• boss buy in
• budget
• budget
• budget EFD prices
• budget and security
• budget budget budget
• budget constrains
• budget constraints
• budget, business afraid of change in IT environment
• budget, compliance
• budget, end user acceptance of cloud services and managed services in general
• budget, knowledge
• budget, organizational issues
• budget.
• budget. always.
• budget? :)
• budgets
• budgets management reluctance/hesitance
• buy in money
• consolidating storage
• constant lack of time extreme bureaucraty
• convince application team robustness of new VMware features
• corporate vision. management buy in.
• cost
• cost
• cost cost cost. FC disks are not really cheap in my region aye.
• cost of hardware,
• cost, physical space
• costs
• costs complexity of management
• costs and implementation time
• currently vstorage compatibility from backup vendors for Vsphere 5.
• department buget every time smaller
• don't understand
• dont know
• economics
• economy
• enough hardware kit to do the necessary tests and the lack of time to do these tests
• esxi to provide host based mirroring
• floor space
• focus
• funding for tools lack of understanding by management on the technology
• hence i have no shop (i'm doing consulting for clients) i don't have additional needs
• high throughput workload
• hmmm
• hummm money ?
• i can`t think of any in this moment
• i do this in my spare time of which i have none
• iPAD 2 , EMC VNXe
• internal policies and documents.
• internal politics!
• internal resources... time and money
• internal workload balancing and time management
• knowing what is out there, time
• knowledge and time.
• knowledge of all vmware products and migration methods to use them.
• lack of money and time
• lack of programming skills or vCloud Director
• lack of staff
• lack of time
• mainly budget, but also unexpected amounts of data growth.
• management cost
• management decisions
• management to see necessity for DR site, client acceptance for VDI
• management unwilling to use advanced features of vmware and storage such as VAAI and SIOC
• manhours
• manpower
• money
• money time
• money :)
• money and not enough manpower
• money and politics
• money and security
• money and time
• money, experience
• money, pardigm shifts in managment thought
• money,money,money
• money. management - same old same old
• money?
• money??
• more memory in my hosts :)
• more storage; 8+ vCPU per VM
• n/a
• n/a getting there :)
• na
• need more bodies... limited manpower
• netapp is killing us pize and also availability, also some issue with DRP location and with FCoE
• networking
• new prices of vmware esx licenses, prices of storage
• no idea
• no idea what are you asking me about here :-)
• no money :)
• no one
• no one.
• no standards in Public Cloud space (vendor lock-in)
• none
• none :-D
• none.
• not enough time
• not sure at this point
• nothing
• nothing
• nothing I can think of
• nothing and totally nothing
• nothing really
• nothing, the sky is the limit!
• nothing, wel love EMC
• old CX300.
• older versions of ESX
• other enterprise projects
• our bosses boss.
• our finance dep,,,
• people.
• performance issues on our NS4-480 lack of capacity on our VNX5500
• politics
• politics, security, ridiculous separation of duty, and non recognition of talent over tenure.
• politics... politics... and occasionally politics
• price
• price on avamar
• price perhaps
• price!
• price, budget
• price, finding qualified consultants
• price, time to market
• prices
• pricing/chargeback politics
• procedures and paperwork :-)
• procrastination, uneducated management, paper work, politics.
• que pasa? bad weather and too much work ;-)
• quick provision of storage
• red tape
• resources and resources
• right now i don't know
• scalabitlity
• silo's backup
• size
• small shop of 4 sysadmins, too much work to get done for migration to new data center
• some bureaucracy :-(
• speed of storage processor, cheaper ssd
• ssd cost
• stability and performance.
• staffing levels
• storage costs
• storage monitoring and performance troubleshooting
• stretched cluster available for cheap arrays
• stuck with fibre channel
• the boss and his boss
• the cost of storage and working at the end cost to customers
• the costs
• the documentation
• the need for capacity planning and os/app optimization tools to be purchased
• the only thing which holds back is the cost
• the price
• the price i think
• the prices the knowlegde
• the term cloud being used for everything purposely confusing non-technical people ie. management
• there are no such things :)
• time
• time
• time money
• time and budget
• time and cash
• time and finance, what else
• time and money of course.
• time to learn the new stuff in a constantly changing world
• time, a 80hr work week
• time, money
• time, money.
• time... need more of it :(
• to many projects, not enough time for my "line" work
• uncertainty
• unlimited budgets? :) Not sure...
• upgrading of old systems fx EMC Documentum
• upper management not understanding vmware feature sets
• vCD adoption
• vCops - waiting for vCOPS v5 and monitoring/metric reporting
• vSphere license costs. SAN storage costs.
• vSphere upgrades to 5.0 and more storage (both capacity and performance).
• vcloud & srm compatability
• vdi terminal servers
• very poor emc support in the last months while we had performance problems storage costs
• vision, budget.
• vmfs to support larger than 2TB vmdk's
• vmware view, still not as good as view IMHO
• we are a consultancy, so generally the arrays we use for customers are very price senstive.
• we usually hold ourselves back.. we need to get out of our own way.
• would like VMware Orchestrator more integration with vCould director
• Currently performance at the storage layer. Looking for a performance/capacity tool to show both the virtualization layer and the storage layer
• budget restrictions, and mangers overcommitting the sysadmin's time to too many projects leaving the maintenance of existing infrastructure ignored.
• Time and effort involved in tweaking for performance on multiple arrays without a dedicated storage team.
• would love to replicate, but have arrays from 2 different vendors - so cost of array and complication/risk of replicating between 2 different arrays
• 1. manpower (too few to storm the bastions) 2. legacy-driven reservations (we have done this for ages so why should it change ...)
• Budget. We do not have nearly enough redundancy, storage or RAM for all the servers and expansion that we will need.
• $$$ We have a budget but it is tight. Also changing the GUI to often is a problem for the engineers. That is why we tried storage virtualisation.
• - redundancy and live failover in streched clusters - expensive storage (capacity extension of existing storage) - no 'tiering' in current storage to seperate workloads
• for enterprise its only questions of money, ROI, etc.. nothing is holding us - we by, what we need.
• End to End topology mapping, for performance and dependency mapping. 200K for an Enterprise VIOPS license is stupid, as is charging me for UIM/O when I was made to use UIM/P with a vBlock.
• Money! The business wants performance and reliability for their remote sites, but it is expensive.
• Cost of storage and the pain of performance issues particularly with VDI as its all about crappy in-guest agents and very old craplications.
• Shockingly bad hardware. Needs a refresh but (chicken and egg) we need to hit some milestones first!
• General cost and quality of products; they have a high cost but when you get your hands on them the features are always limited. When resources are limited you can't always dedicate the full amount of time to researching or building solutions.
• Lots of older legacy applications that do not fit into any normal frameworks. Don't have a good fit for applications in the managed VDI platforms either, so we still do dedicated VMs in most cases.
• Management doesn't want us to purchase unprovisioned server/storage capacity, yet wants us to provide capacity on demand. They are willing to entertain spending 3x-plus to get the same capacity from external cloud providers on and cause lots of headaches because of internal accounting illogic.
• Slow adaptation rate on changes and feature set holes in VMware products (e.g. What vSphere can do and what vCD cannot).
• - Multi-vendor array based replication outside of VMware. - Better WAN acelleration/WAN performance
• Cost of implementing new technologies. We need new storage and 10GB networking to continue growth.
• Backup, Backup, Backup. We are spending far to much time with issues on our Networker installation where we trie to back up "big data". And vmWare vDR is another pain and just not working.
• Vendors need to stop trying to shove large enterprise ideas/products to small/medium shops as these ideas set unrealistic expectations on the IT staff from management which are hampered by said management when they realize that they can't afford to buy every piece of software/hardware.
• Lack of management buy in / awareness of the opportunities provided by cloud architectures and IaaS. Both in how it would make things easier for us as IT and for the end users.
• Lack of a clearly defined vision at times. Not being on the same continent as the majority of the team I'm working with and the platform I'm architecting. Trying to get the EMEA office to spend money on dev kit for me.
• Lacking the Virtualization in most Vision/Missions incl. lack of knowledge from upper management most often kill's any urgent desires. Budgeting the VT platform often includes the networking/storage/x86 costs which then often makes any changes in the VT services "quite" expensive.
• Need oracle certification for stretched clusters on vplex. Persuade oracle to relax about running databases on VMware.
• I need lot of cheap storage like HP MSA/ IBM DS or similar... in compared to the competition EMC sometimes with that prices jump out form my capex... :(
• Cost of vSphere licences, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus vRAM limits, managing storage use (there's still nothing I can click on in vCentre to report on snapshots accurately!!)
• Keeping up with Education and Certification hell... and at the same time trying to keep business flowing :/
• The willingness for clients to invest in a deidicated lab environment to test new technologies as these days dev/test/qa environment with the added availability and flexibity driven by VMware are treated as production environment so IT is back into keeping the fires going in all front and falling back to not having time to test and research new technologies for the benefit of their environment. IT needs a deidicated playplen for evaluating these new technologies.
• Testing/implementation of UIM 3.0 on Vblock 1. NEED Elastic Provisionsing but need assurances, time testing to ensure we can successfully deploy this on Vblocks.
• backup is to expensive, we need to move to a mixed environment with traditional backup strategies (tapes/ data domain) for compliance and retention/tiered based secure archives (atmos + FMA for example) Upper management should accept those changes but is unwilling due to fear of non-compilance.
• Training. I feel that EMC in particular could do a better job of training their partners and customers on their products... specifically around solution design, sizing tools (ESPECIALLY true for FAST Cache and FAST VP environments). Another pain point in particular with EMC is support - we have had a lot of service issues with the VNXe in particular, which we are working with our partner EMC contacts on. Lastly, there needs to be more SMB partner enablement and training for the smaller partners. Our company has a tremendous amount of talent and we are hungrier than any other partner out there, but we feel that EMC is doing little to help us grow. We'll grow with our without your help, but it will be a lot easier if you help us :). We would like to see more dedicated partner resources that understand our company and our business, carry out partner training sessions, help us in sales meetings, help with demos, support issues, etc.
• Lack of integration between our Compellent SANs and Symantec NetBackup, with regards to off-host backups. Also, budget!
• a) Age of storage system (cannot replicate without slowing down the system, can't dedup or thin provision at all, no VAAI integration, etc.) (EMC CX3-40) b) Administration ease-of-use and stability (can't have my SAN crash because of crap FLARE code that EMC chooses not to maintain)
• Cost is the major one, training/time is the other. Right now, we are really just trying to maintain and build out more. I just hope we can start using the cool features already in vmware, never mind new stuff.
• convincing app owners of large/tier 1 workloads VI is the place to be and offers more functionality when compared with old school physical only workloads
• Inertia and Funding. Storage admins who want to keep doing things the way they've always been done, and management convinced that owning our own storage is a waste of money.
• Acceptance of change by the business\other IT app\DBA teams, just because it's always been done like that doesn't mean it still should be. New technology, use appropriately, can add value\cut costs\improve service delivery.
• Strange NFS handling in VMware; still occasionally having problems reconnecting when disconnects occur. Better and cheaper handling of linked clones; we frequently need to clone development environments from a 'golden image.' We flat out cannot afford to implement vCD, and we often need to spin up 10+ clones.
• Storage and RAM. (On one blade chassis I'm running 80 VMs on 5 hosts that have 45GB RAM each host.)
• As we are getting to cloud sized environment, resource usage / right-sizing VMs gets to be tricky. Looking for a product like vCenter Ops to fix this.
• Team time/skills. Insufficient skills and insufficient time to increase the skills. Putting together a business case to push for improvements, when we have users with very low expectations who are happy if it's working now. Not necessarily working quickly, but just working is enough.
• price! bundling of management tools, powerpath, replication, monitoring, etc. into the base price. EqualLogic, Compellant, Nimble, Lefthand all do this in the SMB space and it adds up.
• Automating storage is a lot of effort, better APIs (and especially their documentation) would save us a lot of time.
• Nothing right now. We just upgraded from two terminal servers to VMs. Great upgrade and I need to learn more about where we are before I can know where we need to go.
• Management. I worked for a communications service provided where I had built a solid virtualization cluster that hosted more than half of our ISP servers and was in the process of virtualizing the remainder when we were sold to another company. I had convinced one set of management and now am working hard to convince another set, however the total number of systems that are eligible for virtualization has increased, along with the hope to build redundancy into two datacenters so the costs have also increased making this an uphill battle.
• Rule based VM deployment. Being able to automate the placement of VM's on a volume based on the SLA, the current VM count and available space.
• Price of entry level SANs needs to drop. Still hovering in the $10K-$20K mark. Need to drop down to $3K-$5K.
• Trying to get funding for another shelf of storage. DBAs being slow in virtualising Oracle + MS SQL.
• Politics on the IT Management level and conservative Dba role prevent us at present time to start taking Oracle virtualization more serious.
• Implied Cost of storage - customers in our market (NZ IaaS space) aren't prepared, aren't educated enough to pay the $/GB required for the kind of service they expect. Existing investment - stuff becomes obsolete so quickly. Capex is an issue adn we would like to see more vendors offering a pay-as-you-go model for storage. I know its coming from some vendors but need it to be clear how and why this is different to lease for non-technicals.
• Procedures and processes that take time to get approvals and move forward. Procuring testing equipment before moving forward to ensure a platform can perfrom effectively.
• Minorly complex products (SRM, vCD) become overly complex in the enterprise when multiple teams are involved. Storage, networking, VMware, OS support, OS deployment. These teams tend to have engineering and ops counterparts.
• Time and management buy-in to do something of the things we want. We very much want to focus on automation but are too busy keeping out head above water.
• NO SRA FOR MIRRORVIEW keeping us from 5.0 Sucky vendors that won't let their poorly written apps run on VMware because some other hack job didn't setup their VMware environment correctly
• upgrading old enterprise licenses to enterprise plus and detailed design documents to upgrade to vSphere5. Also still waiting on the microcode and on-tap to be upgraded to support VAAI and VASA
• SANs are not geared up for virtualizing Exchange 2010. It makes more sense on DAS, and it shouldn't.
• Total amount of storage. We can't upgrade our SAN fast enough to keep up with making more virtual servers and the increase in regular data storage.
• Funding / Making price competitive offers for customer cases. (Sometimes prevents doing things as they should)
• Being able to assess my network for how much a physical machine would actually need within a virtual environment.
• We average 2400 configuration deployments a month within Lab Manager. Having the Disk IOPS, controller IOPS, and bandwidth to it is our biggest challenge. The next biggest is the limitation of only 8 Hosts accessing a file on a datastore. Architecting a solution around this while having enough proc/mem resources but not wasting though resources becomes a PITA.
• Insufficient integration possibilities between different infrastructure components Servers - Storage - Virtualization (see comment 16 for example)
• Internal Politics (Clinical Server Needs vs Infrastructure needs) and "restrictive" budgets. Everything is project based and we have to nickel and dime ourselves just to keep the business running from an infrastructure perspective. Due to this, *aaS is more like as-a-stepchild then as-a-service. Ideally, I would love to see the barriers break down and have everything shared as a internal resource with chargeback, etc (kind of how Cisco and other Big IT shops run their internals). That also bleeds into lead times for projects that ARE funded. From when we say we want to do something to when the gear hits the floor and is configured takes months. We could also use more DC floor space :)
• Mine and others education. Most engineers still, just get by. Look for those opportunities, read up once in a while about what is out there.. For goodness sake, take a vSpecialist to dinner. It is amazing what you'll learn.
• Standardization of storage requirements and provisioning. Need for thin provisioning to help with storage of VM's. VM's take a back seat of iSeries since that's what drives our business.
• - The 2 TB vmdk limit really sucks for us b/c we have very large storage requirements on our VM - Getting storage to scale with us without having to make million dollar inventments (need building block approach like EqualLogic, but for enterprise datacenter)
• Traditionally at VMware the one thing holding back development work is the ability for lab equipment. While we have equipment there never seems to be the power in our buildings to power it on.
• Trying to get buy in from finance on why an IT as a Service model actually will help us an IT department even if it means we cost more as we will have a bigger impact on the business. Also working with many different business units that don't believe we're capable of moving quickly.
• We are where we need to be but I see lots of customers that are holding back. I think they're holding back because there is so much change happening right now. The industry lacks decision makers that think long term with a good strategy.
• Time. There just isn't enough time to dep dive into all of the cool things happening in storage.
• Cost of software licenses and hope VM continues on its path of creating virtual appliances based on open source OS's.
• The cost of storage is atrocious. It's extremely hard to justify to management. I wish there were more options to utilize flash for performance that wouldn't break the bank
• Budget; licensing costs for guest apps (not VMware or guest OS; eg, change in MS SQL from per-socket to per-core)
• Budget. :) In a more ideal scenario, we'd be fully replicated everywhere and have money to buy all of the tools we need. I'd also like more educational opportunities. I learn a ton off of blogs, and we've been fortunate enough to go to VMWorld and EMCWorld the last two years, but I'd like to see more online resources available.
• 1.) Standardize on storage already!! We're getting there. 2.) Time to continue the virtualization journey, other projects seem to take priority
• Not much SSD based solution/offering within HP. Not having all in all Auto Tiering feature for it's broad portfolio.
• Time and Money. Work for quite a small business. We want to go 100% virtual and prob will. Haven't found technical obstacles. Would really like to deploy view next
• Our SAN team seems to be behind the times and out of touch with how things should work with VMware. They still recommend RDMs to help with performance. They don't provide enough FA ports to our hosts and we are now measure latency in seconds because of all these poor architectural decisions.
• Nothing major at the moment, except that we're looking into Virtual Instrument in order to get a more in-depth look into the storage layer and make easier to correlate issues.
• Down time, Development time to utilize features provided by the increase in Infrastructure technologies
• Storage admin thinks everything is OK when it's not. (I'm a VMware admin with no say in what storage we buy and how it's used.)
• Storage is our biggest issue. We always need more and we are constantly worried about how we are going to backup it up in a timely fashion and replicate it offsite. We have been trying to put together a co-lo for over a year but the amount of data we need to replicate is the biggest hurdle we can’t seem to get around.
• Budget was/is our biggest hurdle. The VNXe line has all but addresses that. Replacing our CX soon and if you factor in maintenance cost of the CX the VNXe is next to free. Still trying to get approval for a second at the DR and SRM, probably not this year.
• Most of my customers are a bit scared to use the latest ESX versions. but all the coolness is in the latest version of course :)
• Absence of vertical view of all arrays (multiple vendors, not only EMC), small team supporting gast geography, lack of skills in-country.
• Time and staff. Too busy fighting fires and working on the urgent project of the day to be as proactive as necessary.
• A capability for management to make decisions vice putting everything on hold while we discuss it even though we know it would be beneficial and we have the funds to make it happen
• Some customers are not aware of every cool feature vSphere has, so in my very particular case I'd like a better job from the marketing teams to help us, the engineers and consultants to spread the word :-)
• more knowledge, i am self taught and would love a mentor to get more more and more knowledge of this stuff!
• Pricing on vmware licenses, problems transfering licenses after purchasing other companies, and storage pricing for a SMB.
• Money, Management and a reliance on a single vendor for storage, despite a track record of poor performance and installation.
• Resources to start a proper P2V migration plan, dealing with some skepticism against virtualization from customers.
• 10 gig - HCA - bigger switches - faster throughput - using 8 1 gig nics and 2 4 gb fiber - sigh....
• Company global politics, we have CISCO UCS + ESX + IBM(storage), rather than the EMC storage, so no vblock, due to global policy to buy from IBM
• 1. Storage guy not letting me use unisphere because our version would let me see his password. 2. Cant crack the LDAP/AD parms in Orchestrator setup so I can use it. We have a strange AD setup. 3. Need cheaper training. M$ got big when they made training easier to get. It is now in some High Schools for free.
• Scale and lifecycle management of storage is starting to become a challenge. Replacing arrays is difficult. Managing risk and balancing storage economies of scale is challenging (how many eggs do you put in a single server/switch/storage array)
• Explaining licensing cost (e.g. cost between different vSphere versions) and liccensing cost vs other products.
• Costs on SSD's are still ridiculous for any large IOPS driven requirement. Sure, FAST cache and SSD's help with IOPS but they are just too expensive right now and the frames themselves come associated with too much of an OPEX expense.
• Limitation on the storage vendor (HDS). Recent product improvements from their side didnt help any of our problems as to geoclustering. boo!
• Having access to equipment to perform the needed development evaluation and documentation of processes to support our client environment.
• We use storage in a lab environment. EMC support is BRUTAL when I need something done quickly, particularly when it can cause data loss, which we don't mind, and have state/written several times. We have been waiting for over a year to get a key fob so we can BIN our VMAX ourselves.
• We have been waiting for our secondary datacenter to come online so we can build our metro cluster. We have an overly complex environment due to organic growth. We are engaging in a major redesign but until that is done, we're struggling.
• clients not being able to understand the benefits that this new vitrtual world brings them at a slightly higher cost that what they are use to. SMB(10-250 people)
• Cost of storage. It's just so expensive. We also do not have a good way to find orphaned VMs that various business units have essentially abandoned but not told us about. Reclaiming that disk space would be great but it is easier said than done.
• It's mainly all about politics and reluctance to changes (damn change manager). Difficulty to keep up with storage spending, too many people get used to have virtual machine for free + no cross charging in place makes my life difficult.
• Time to allocate to configuration (non billable time) and budget. The 'shop' is a lab for demonstration for customers and study for certifications.
• Tunnelvision from the moneyguys because they never see the good things about everything that costs money...
• vCloud Director does not support multiple storage tiers in the same Provider vDC. This really has limited our deployment of vCloud and will until we can do everything as easily in cloud as we can in vSphere.
• Mmm.. Tired of check if that sata adapter / raid card / network card is supported on ESX cause, for develop we cannot afford sometimes the price of "the complete storage / connectivity pack" (aka netapp, certified servers,etc,etc)
• Cost always rules but if you spend the time which isn't always available for capability justification it can functionality can supercede.
• Time to test and implement additional VMware products. Other members of my team are not as involved in our VMware support which slows me down due to lack of people to bounce ideas and problems off of.
• Leagacy needs complicates things. It's difficult to plan when economics are as they are in the world now.
• We need VMware to let us group host for DRS, FT, and HA rules. IE we have 3 hosts at each of the 3 data centers but we can't tell VMware not to run redundant VM at the same site only not the same host.
• I'm a consultant so work on a variety of customers environments. Biggest thing holding me back is time to get around to all the customers to implement some of the cool storage features.
• The very first thing it's always the money part...Second and not least, is the HUGE fud around all storage vendors. I really need to drill down all the marketing stuff and "mine's is bigger's than yours" attitude to really make a good choice.
• Time (lack of human resources) Lak of real knowlege about the virtualization stack from others on my team.
• Different teams in my company needs to be up to date in their comfort zone to be able to use the new feature of vmware. (ex: Can't use VAAI because the storage team is not ready to upgrade their hardware. Can't install VSI cause they have not certified it yet internally))
• Budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget, budget... did I mention the budget? The other big thing would be a lack of time to dedicate to researching new technologies and how best to implement them in our environment.
• A great tool to lay out maps to graphically show array utilization for the combined block/file system.
• Resources and traditions are the 2 biggest obstacles. Cost and people are the 2 constraining resources. In public higher education, the purse is always small. Employee time always plays a role too. We would do a lot more if we had time to complete it. Most of the traditions are going the way of the dinosaur, but some are persistent. The worst ones are: I need to get as much machine as I can possibly afford, because 3 years from now, I won't be able to just add more RAM or CPU. In ESX 2.X my vm had some performance problems so, clearly now that we are on ESX 5, their vm will still have performance problems, right? They are also afraid that they will l
• Corporate IT centralization of infrastructure, which saves HW $, but it drives down productivity. Thus, I'm not a big fan of vCloud.
• Price licenses vmware. Sometimes very high. Time is just not on our side, that's why i don't have enough time to test further.
• We spend to much time dealing with software issues to have the fun of getting our network where it ...could... be.
• Perception, despite all the information. If I VM DBs my DBAs will first blame, VMware, then blame storage, then blame network before finally looking at their problems.
• Complexity of our existing networks. Huge number of legacy applications. Bandwidth of application teams to support testing and transition.
• Cloud offerings are making justifying necessary CAPEX hardware purchases more difficult. Open source software "alternatives" providing ultimately ineffective "good enough" solutions rather than best of breed
• Our EMC sales and install reps only sized our CX4 for the current deployment. They did not allow for growth.
• Budget cuts eliminated the help desk personel so its just sysadmin (me) to support a few dozen servers and 200 very ignorant users. No budget for licenses or infrastructure either.
• DBA si not convinced of Virtualization Technology Support not trusted by management holding back on T1 DB virtualization
• Mostly management. Since every vendor has flashy presentations in which it all looks so simple, they (management) just don't get it. And therefore, there is no money to get where we want. :/
• Faster, modern Storage with VAAI in-house; only customers buy the cool rigs, while we, as an EMC partner have to starve with 5 years old rigs.
• Get all products (application, partitions, VMs, LUN/share, storage box, backup server/media) work together and keep the overview. Generally the more complex management.
• Money and lack of available maintenance time. Even though a lot of operations can be performed without any downtime (storage vmotion, reboot single controller/SP, etc), management still does not feel comfortable and will not let us perform some of these tasks during production hours.
• My Dell MD3000i is not on the HCL for vSphere 5, and I can almost guarantee that we will not be able to buy a different array right now. So, I can't upgrade to vSphere 5 in my production environment.
• Cost, the cool stuff is just too expensive. The vendors are indeed pushing the boundries but its only Global Enterprises using the tech, SMEs need 12-24 months to obtain that tech.
• Time, there is just never enough of it, unfortunately slowing it down for everyone else but me isn't likely to happen anytime soon. :(
• Cost is the big holdback. With the economy everything needs to be justified with useful numbers to back it up.
• Knowledge and price. At the moment I am the #1 VMware / Storage guy at this client. And I do not know enough about EMC storage to suggest it (my own fault of course) and the cost is usually a hard sell.
• figuring out host hardware combinations. Few hosts with lots of memory or more hosts with just enough memory
• Budget. Spent alot of money on NetApp and then IT staff walked away from it. Having trouble getting it to do what we want and provide performance. Management nightmare and vendor lock-in.
• having to go through several layers of administration to justify spending and or configuration change.
• Cost of products for Disaster Recovery. vSphere with the bells and whistles to provide for DR/BC for up to 10 hosts was cost prohibitive for our EDU. So, we're waiting on Windows Server 8 with Hyper-V to do async VM replication for free.
• In-house application packaging. It takes so much of our time we don't get to work on cool projects like automated datacenter failover/etc
• Ideally we'd like to move to vSphere 5.0 but due to delays in support for plug-ins from 3rd parties and the business justification/planning - this will take far longer than anticipated.
• Cost and time. With so many features to evaluate and configure a small admin team is taxed to assimilate, implement and document what they already have let alone research and evaluate new features. And storage cost is ridiculous. You either pay emc or hp or netapp an arm and a leg for storage or you suffer through poor support and possibly unproven technology it seems.
• Lack of Management Imagination / Belief that standard IT practice can be improved by orders of magnitude. Not just my shop, almost every shop
• Knowing what we truly need and finance. (sorry if this has come through twice looked like it bombed out on me last time)
• Cost - we are an educational institution, and while we get good software discounts (decent from EMC/VMware - VERY good from MS (practically free)), its often hard to get budget allocations for nice big storage arrays.
• Too long of refresh cycles. We have an NS-120 and would love to be on some of the newer gear from EMC, but we will not be back in the storage market for another 2-3 years.
• Reliable compatiblity, new features don't always work with all the products i use and there's no easy way to check, so it's safer to avoid them
• Capacity management is a nightmare and backups are a PITA... while we are only 1500 VMs today we are turning on 5-10 a day! So please get Avamar working with tape properly so we can provide enterprises with what they need/want. FAST and Datadomain are great products - but in the SP space they are a PITA for pricing... so we need something that helps calculate pricing on the fly or can analyze (from say from an existing VMware vCentre) what mix of drives/performance a customer will need. I could see this working in the commercial/channel/reseller space also as a great sales tool. In the SP space its a race to the bottom for price so I hope EMC is up to supporting SP's to get the lion share of the market... Within NZ (and we, Datacom, are on the NZ Government supply panel) its a total land grab. CIOs are busting to move to IaaS given ANZ is already massively virtualized.
• Decision makers not have a clear road map for where they would like to take the organization. Makes it challenging to provide accurate and long term solutions.
• resources, need additional storage array at a secondary data center. also bandwidth for replication.
• Initial hardware costs are by far the hardest to justify. Wearing too many hats to spend as much time as I'd like thoroughly researching and playing with new features.
• upper management buy in and understanding about the benefits of virtualization. upper management understanding that enterprise storage isn't cheap.
• High capital cost of storage equipment, difficulty getting management to buy in on anything that provides needed IOPS capacity, because it's not SATA; and "SAS is expensive".
• Personally speaking the things stopping my team from advancing are staffing resources / time / training investment. Current financial climate dictates that we have to do more with less. EMC technology is allowing us to do that.
• There really isn't anything on the storage or VMware side that's holding us back. Lack of time is pretty much our main issue.
• Being able to reliably find which VMs are causing performance issues, storage integration with vCloud Director for provisioning etc
• Security Compliance slows things down a lot e.g. hardening guides or lack of, also EAL certification etc (Gov't agency)
• Staffing - no time for others to become fluent enough in what's deployed and/or available to contribute in any meaningful way.
• Licensing. Revised is better but many of my VI admin colleagues are considering other options. And that worries me.
• Realistically, storage is the limiting factor of what I can do today. It's easy to 'solve' problems with memory/cpu/networking, but actual storage IO is hard to quantify, instrument and then monitor from end to end. I'd love to see EMC do something analagous to what Tintri does with their appliance which can show storage latency at just about any point with a decent graphic that is easy to work with.
• Lack of understanding of the virtual revolution at the highest levels of technology management. Too many people want to keep thinking that virtual maps well to how things were done 5 or 20 years ago.
• Monitoring systems that can clearly tell me about my entire virtual infrastructure from compute to storage. From the ones I have tested so far, nothing really works out of the box.
• Struggles to get management to purchase/implement a storage solution that is not an older generation or refurb due to their thoughts that new devices are costly and/or have too many bugs.
• Cost and convincing executives to invest in newer technology. Things are getting expensive paying per user or device. In the past up front costs where higher but if you got funding then that was it.
• Vmware licensing cost - hardware cost doesn't matter if we can't swing for the fancy non-Essentials licenses, even with the EDU discount
• -replication flexibility -hard facts to present a clean study and have the credit previewed... for next year
• Competent administrators and time. I can get by with one architect, but finding vSphere, network/SAN and storage admins who understand...really, truly understand...their respective gear/software is difficult. The second is time. There is simply not enough time to keep up with the incredible pace of things. By the time I can test and engineer for the current feature set, it's two revisions out of date. By the time that engineering work has been deployed, it's four revisions out.
• Working for a consultancy I see many different situations, however the main driver in getting to where we need to be is cost.
• Tech services being one minded in there purchases. We seem to be an HP shop with no change it site/
• The cost of centralized storage is the biggest hinderance for virtualization initiatives. Our environment would be much more advanced and larger if it weren't for the high barrier to access the technology.
• Constantly increasing VMware pricing is preventing us from implementing "cool" features such as vCloud, AppInsight and SRM (and possibly even View), from buying larger servers due to vRam licensing along with increased per proc prices, and have caused a renewed executive interest in Hyper-v and "good enough" virtualization. I now have to focus more energy on politics rather than technology and it is difficult not to get frustrated with VMware. It was once easy to show savings with VMware. Not anymore. I really like VMware technologies but they have been making work more and more difficult politically of late. Even I am now tempted to explore other options.
• DMX are not supporting any VMware features (4.1 or otherwise) although the customer just purchased it a little over a year ago. WTH.
• Cost Justification - Its really hard to determine ROI on something that is already working "ok". Upper Management Knowledge on Related Technologies. Its a challenge to learn all of the features myself, then I have to relate them to our business and justify it to management that think they know everything about storage. Even when we have performance problems because of their poor decisions.
• The process to buy expensive stuff like storage arrays, is really time-consuming. Resource management is really difficult, when buying new shelves takes months of time. Maybe a grow-as-you-use model on the VMAX would make it easier for us. The second thing is the reality vs. marketing gap. EMC's marketing works ok. VMware tends to be a bit too positive for their features and limits. It is always hard to explain, why something does not work out, when there is a nice colorful paper stating the opposite. It's usually nittheopposite, but there-conditions are far from reality.
• In education it's incredibly difficult to plan, because workload requirements shift over time and who knows what the next research project is going to want?
• Challenges with obtaining NFR Licensing from VMWare and other software vendors Getting new hardware such as VMAXe or new UCS blades
• Our company is a financial one so at the moment I need to justify costs/benefits even more than usual at the moment.
• Constant 300ms disk latency and occasional 25,000ms disk latency. Trust me, if we had good disk performance, we'd be at 10,000 VDI sessions next month.
• Too much security and red tapes that change management is restricted, but other than that fully control environment and fully operational.
• Ease of use, storage cost, especially licensing cost for each feature recurring at each expansion(disk or Gb)
• depends on the shops, smbs looking for cloud services rather, than implementing by themselves. bigger ones starting too, btw.
• Want to have real 10Gig iSCSI or Fibre Channel Arrays - but infrastructure costs are too high. Now using existent hardware with Starwind software.
• SAN i/o is a constant thorn in our eyes. More i/o capability without spending a fortune would be more than welcome.
• lack of managemnt support to use home-brew storage systems that outperform all those arrogant storage sellers.
• Money to get a VNX, knwoldege of the celerra platform, training credits for myself in order to better understand our products.
• Сost of equipment