Trying to come up with a Convincing Risk Assessment to get the boss to upgrade from ESX Foundation.

[TallDarknFugly]

Has anyone had to do this? Any pointers?

Right now, the scenario is I'm new at my place of work and while I was checking in the big thing was Server Virtualization. Problem is, the boss seems to be a little tight-handed so right now we are stuck with ONE ESX Server hosting about 9 production servers. There's no HA, DRS, nothing... Just that one box sitting alone. Ive taken it upon myself to draft a strong risk assessment that wouldforce him to take the steps to protect the network or at least cover our asses in the event Murphy's Law rears it's ugly head. The goal is to get the boss to upgrade to Virtual Center and purchase another box to facilitate HA.

Does anyone have any pointers on line items I can add to this assessment? I'm pushing a theme that we were better off with the physical server than with than the situation right now and to not upgrade will be to have spent all the money we did so far just to increase the risk factor.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Put everything in $s. This is what they know. So consider the worse case, you are on vacation and the ESX server goes down due to a hardware issue. What is the 'cost' associated with this.

I.e. cost of someone coming in, cost of after hours support calls to hardware vendor and vmware. Cost of rushed new equipment. Cost of Admin time to recovery the VMs or migrate them to new host. The cost of how much the business is loosing due to the VMs being down, etc....

Costs are the biggest things you can develop that will give the Manager the quantitative risk.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization