How to fix a company mindset against management

Tayschrenn 6 Reputation points
2020-10-27T14:58:40.863+00:00

I'm running into a situation where a coworker rightly questioned whether or not we're going to get approved for SCVMM for our environment due to the costs.

To me, having worked at companies from SMB up to $7b orgs, the fact that a <$1b enterprise would even question that need, boggles the mind. The issues is we're a victim of our own success. Previous to me starting the smaller team managed all the hosts and clusters fine without it. They wrote a custom PS script to deploy a template VM anywhere, and never got anywhere when they pushed for things like DSC or SCCM/SCVMM for ease in management or deployment.

For context: ~400 VMs world wide, over 39 Hyper-v hosts including two clusters of 5 hosts each. Microsoft EA with good pricing, and Datacenter licenses on our clusters as well as a few ROBO locations due to size.

I've argued that it's simply a ton easier to manage and maintain, better visibility, better performance by metric driven balancing, and a few others. None seem to impress anyone. I'm at the point where it's literally about to make me look elsewhere because of how narrow minded they are, as they see my time as cheaper than the automations and solutions Microsoft - and indeed vmware - have built to make enterprise management easier.

To make matters worse, SCOM is a PITA and Azure Monitor apparently way better, but it's an all or nothing with SC right now on licensing and it doesn't include Azure Monitor or even Azure Update Manager in the cost, which is total BS. This makes it even harder for me to get approvals.

What do you think?

System Center Virtual Machine Manager
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  1. Crystal-MSFT 48,591 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2020-10-28T04:15:31.323+00:00

    @Tayschrenn , Totally agree with you, In Fact, there are many tools available by default that allow Hyper-V administrators to effectively manage Hyper-V hosts and clusters. These include Hyper-V manager, Failover Cluster Manager, and PowerShell. However, for much more powerful, efficient, and fully-featured management experience with Hyper-V hosts and clusters, System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a single management tool that consolidates the configuration, management, and monitoring of Hyper-V infrastructure. SCVMM is a paid product from Microsoft. So, organizations will need to examine their individual business cases for the investment in System Center licensing. However, the return is efficient management and consolidation of tools and processes can offset the initial licensing cost.

    Here is a link list some reseaons for choosing SCVMM. We can read it for the reference.
    https://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/scvmm/
    Note: Non-microsoft.link, just for the reference.

    Hope it can help.

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