This week, the Channel Pro team has been chatting about different industry trends, and in particular, the virtualisation ‘love-in’ that we’ve seen happening for a while now. Better utilisation of resources, lower power consumption, ease of management – the list of things virtualisation can do seems endless. Too good to be true? Well maybe it is, a little.

Those who remember back to the switch from mainframe to client server will recognise another paradigm shift, but there are some drawbacks. Much more technically adept colleagues tell me virtual machines are easy to set up and deploy but gauging performance is much trickier. And even though assets are now sweated harder, performance is degraded as resources are no longer dedicated.

No problem really – just buy more powerful hardware. But if you’re trying to rein in costs, a server upgrade programme is the last thing you really want to do. Ironically, most large virtualisation projects coincide with a server upgrade anyway, so parts of the savings are absorbed by capital investment.

Training is another area of concern; the skill set for designing, deploying and managing virtualised environments is still relatively new. There are no industry standards for the management processes of a virtualised environment and there will be issues as different individuals or teams fumble their way through designing a virtual policy within each environment.

Lastly, there is fear. At a basic level, few IT professionals want to work themselves out of a job. The magic bullet that is virtualisation often reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure. Rows of telex operators or switchboard staff were made obsolete very quickly by modern data input systems and IVR, and although not as extreme, virtualisation could potentially reduce the need for a distinct layer of IT staff.

OK, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate here, as the rise of virtualisation is unstoppable – it provides too many benefits. However, the IT industry needs to arm itself with a counter to the potential issues it brings, both technical and cultural, to ensure the smoothest of sales.