Thursday, May 20, 2010

My VMworld session ready for public voting

Update: Unfortunately, my session was not among the lucky winners. Apparantly, the world is not ready for exciting service descriptions ;-) In stead, I'll be going to VMworld in CPH as an attendee.

My session has passed the internal review and is now ready for public voting. It is placed under 'Private Cloud - Management' and the title is:

Defining your services and offerings on vSphere

Description:

As virtual infrastructures (VI) comprise a complex set of technologies, varying perceptions of virtual infrastructures and virtual servers, tend to exist. Ask any VI admin, a sales person, or a customer and you will likely get three different answers. As organizations grow, the degree of specialization typically increases, which augments the number of departments that contribute in the service delivery model. A lack of definitions for input, output and responsibility areas between these interfaces can have a negative impact such as prolonged delivery times and an unclear delivery and pricing model. Another consequence of not defining your services is that someone else will do it for you. This could be the sales department or a solution architect that sell a custom solution due to a lack of existing building blocks. These solutions typically do not scale well and the technical design tends to be less than optimal. Services, whether it be an ‘ESX operations service’ or a ‘virtual Windows server service’, need to be defined, standardized, and published in a service catalogue. Furthermore, there should be a clear distinction between an internal service and an external customer offering. These matters will be addressed in this session as well as different examples of how a virtual infrastructure- and a virtual server service can be defined. This session builds on the theoretical framework of the updated ITIL v3, specifically with a focus on Service Design and the Service Catalogue.