We used to dream of days when hypervisors would make it onto the executive agenda.
OK maybe not, but why not take advantage of the sudden CEO attention brought on by the 300% jump in your VMware bill? Proposing and executing a VMware to Hyper-V migration is an opportunity to show the C-suite what IT can do, and how it can improve company performance.
The trick is to talk about everything but the technology.
For the C-suite, the conversation will almost definitely start with cost — both the increase in and unpredictability of VMware’s price. They want leverage, and a migration is how you give it to them. Even if today’s price increase isn’t a dealbreaker, they now know the cost is variable at whim, and they don’t want to be caught out with the next one.
As headline-grabbing as the costs are, you don’t want to let that be the only takeaway. A good migration offers more than just a move. With a recent client, we were able to increase capacity by 250% and performance headroom by more than 40%, at the price they were already paying. Just as important, we set them up for scale and portability going forward. They’ll be able to get the resources they need when they need them, without being beholden to any one provider.
That’s the kind of story that takes IT from a line item to a strategic asset.
When you walk leadership through the ways a new hypervisor will change work, make no assumptions about what they know or don’t know. Show them the possible future, then tell them exactly how it differs from the present, preferably in terms of increased efficiency, security and savings, and you’re much more likely to get the resources and recognition you need.
How do you deal with immediate and acute interest in IT spend?
The newfound interest in IT isn’t without its strings. If you’re hearing from management all of a sudden, it’s likely for the same reason our phones at Summit are ringing. Infrastructure bills are going up, and they don’t know why or what to do about it. Fortunately, the reason is business.
Virtualization bills are up because Broadcom purchased VMware, the industry leader, and started raising prices and bundling services.
Simple, universal, and unavoidable. There was nothing you or anyone else could do to keep costs down. And while you maybe could have guessed prices would go up, a migration is too heavy a bet to place on “probably.”
Fortunately, if this is how the conversation starts, you have an immediate answer.
How do you break down VMware costs and Hyper-V savings?
For almost any executive, it’s all going to come back to cost. There are so many ways to save money in a hypervisor migration, but Hyper-V offers savings you can quantify before you even start. If your company is already using Microsoft Office, Hyper-V comes with licenses for your virtual machines.
It’s not a freebie, and it’s usually not even the biggest savings we find when we migrate a client from VMware to Hyper-V. But Office licenses for virtual machines are a clear line item on the expense sheet, and Hyper-V makes it disappear.
If they’re interested and open to it, you can certainly introduce them to some of the other cost benefits of a migration — the opportunities to find unused applications and under-utilized capacity. You can even walk them through the purpose of a hypervisor, to traffic cop your workloads so you can maximize your resources.
If that’s all going to sound a little too hypothetical for them though, you have the concrete argument. You’re paying for Office licenses separately now, and when we’re done, you won’t be.
What if Microsoft takes a page from the Broadcom book?
It’s really Broadcom taking a page from the Microsoft book, isn’t it? But say you’re talking to executives who are suspicious, and wise enough to worry that Microsoft will wait until Hyper-V has enough of the market, then follow Broadcom’s lead and hike up prices. You’ll want to have an answer.
Here, the answer is two-fold. One, every additional Microsoft product a business uses makes the ecosystem stickier. Microsoft has an interest in keeping Hyper-V competitive not for the sake of selling more of that particular product, but to sell more of all of its products. If you’re using Hyper-V for your private cloud, it only makes sense to use Azure for your public cloud, and vice-versa. Microsoft benefits from capturing the largest possible share of the technology used by any given company, and it will offer cost-savings to do it.
There is a dark side to that as well — the further you go into Microsoft’s ecosystem, the harder it is to get out. It’s a valid concern, which is why we work so hard at Summit to address it in the migration process. As we architect the new solution, we do it in the most universal way possible, so your virtual machines are more portable tomorrow than they are today.
That portability is leverage. And CEOs love leverage.
How long will a VMware to Hyper-V Migration take?
Doing a migration will take time, and setting this expectation at the start will save you a lot of pain and lost face down the line.
You want to prepare your executives for an eight-week process, minimum. That doesn’t mean your team will be working on it for eight weeks — when you work with Summit, the business is usually only involved for a quarter of that time. It also doesn’t mean downtime. We have the flexibility to back up resources during the migration, derisking the project and keeping the company functional throughout the time.
We can also fit the eight weeks needed for a migration into your business’s existing schedule. For some of our clients, we’ll even estimate the hardware needs and place the orders now, so they’re protected from future cost swings while also being ready to go the second they say go.
Getting sign-off, and credit, for a successful hypervisor migration
Your leadership team already understands the urgency — and if they don’t yet, that bill will come. You just have to show them that you have a plan, that you’ve already considered the costs and risks, and that there are plenty of benefits on the other side.
Then you just need to make sure they remember who turned that high bill into a strategic opportunity come bonus time.
