HELP WANTED! Looking for Virtualization Experts?

Are you currently searching to find virtualization experts for your organization? If so, you aren’t alone. This is a common request coming from IT shops around the world right now as they try to fill positions for developers, testers, administrators and datacenter engineers.

As virtualization adoption continues to grow, the need to hire virtualization solution architects, developers, implementation specialists and virtualization administrators will continue to grow as well. And if you’ve been listening to all of the different analyst reports that have been hitting the wire, you probably already know that the virtualization growth rate is expected to continue to climb at an alarming rate.

While the proliferation of this technology throughout the IT world is a good thing, trying to locate and acquire professionals with this special skill set isn’t as easy as you might think.

“With the boom of the virtualization market, the fight for top talent with domain expertise is as intense as ever”, said Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix. “Any organization that has that talent is fiercely protective of them. But, like other booms in other times (think E-commerce in 1999), the allure of start-ups and helping build something from the ground up is still compelling. That’s how we’re winning the battle.”

Dholakia continued, “This is such a young market, true expertise in virtualization – i.e. someone who has been working in the space for 3+ years – is an extremely rare commodity. Since that talent is what drives 100% of our business, the battle to get them is at the top of my priority list every single day.”

VMLogix admits that these virtualization experts can be hard to find. And because of that, people are generally willing to pay a premium to bring them onboard by enticing them away from current employers or other opportunities.

Jason Mattox, Vizioncore’s VP of Products and Support and CTO finds it notable to recognize just how much virtualization is attracting professionals from other disciplines to come over to the virtualization side of the fence. He said “The pace of development, the shifting paradigm, just the sheer excitement of this technology (not to mention the VMware stock price) are powerful motivators for people to move into this industry.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota based virtualization consulting firm, Xcedex, is 100% focused on helping companies go virtual. To do that, the company needs all of their employees to be considered “experts” in virtualization. The company’s CTO, David Payne said, “We’ve never actually been able to find someone off the street that has enough experience to start and be considered an expert on day one. This was especially true in the early years working with virtualization. Most people not only didn’t have virtualization experience, they hadn’t even heard of VMware. What we had to do was create a training process to take people with the right background and turn them into virtualization experts. That is the method we have followed over the last 4 years.”

Payne continued, “The trouble with hiring for virtualization is that it isn’t a mutually exclusive skill like Java programming or Cisco networking. Infrastructure virtualization touches nearly every part of the datacenter from storage & networks to operating systems and applications. So rather than look for virtualization experts, we look for infrastructure experts. These are people that have experience managing datacenters where they’ve been exposed to servers, shared storage, networking, OS and application management. Give me a fairly well rounded infrastructure person with decent social/consulting abilities, and I can layer on a virtualization skill set pretty quickly.”

Vizioncore’s Mattox said his company is hiring like crazy as well and he believes that virtualization experts do exist but that they are typically created “in the trenches”.

“This is such a young technology, at least on the x86 side of the equation, that there are few avenues for formal education outside of what is being provided by the virtualization platform vendors. VMware, for example, has a certification program for their platform.”

But Mattox believes that experts are coming out of two paths: one is on the user side of the technology and the other is on the provider side.

He continued, “Out of the body of knowledge that is being collected and shared across these groups, there is definitely a set of best practices emerging and being validated. A lot of the learned knowledge is shared in virtualization communities, in user groups and across blogging sites. That’s where you get a ‘rubber meets the road’ perspective on the things that work and the things that don’t.”

Vizioncore, like Xcedex, looks for people with strong IT skills who are intelligent, flexible, and resourceful as well as quick studies. Mattox said “having worked extensively with virtualization on the VMware platform, we have built quite a knowledge base internally and we have been doing a good job of knowledge transfer to new employees to bring them up to speed. I think any company in this industry will need to employ this formula today.”

So if an organization finally takes that leap of faith – moving from a physical to a virtual world – what options are available to them and what should they know?

“There are two ways companies can go,” said Andi Mann, Research Director for the analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “One is to hire new people for their virtualization efforts, another is to train existing people. I tend to advise my clients to go for the latter for a few reasons.”

“Firstly, there are availability issues around hiring new staff. They don’t teach VMware or Xen at the university (yet!), so virtualization specialists simply aren’t available as fresh graduates. So you are forced to go to the existing labor market, and there is such a high demand and limited supply there that you will end up paying premiums to draw people away from other companies – and they are then just as likely to jump ship again if they are offered something bigger and better elsewhere. Plus, a lot of the best people are seeing the demand and going into consulting, not looking for permanent work, so you have to wonder if you are getting the best people anyway.”

Mann continued, “On the other hand, your existing IT staff already know so much, it is worth the additional investment to get them up to speed on virtualization – both formal training, and with practical skills transfer using short-term consultants. They know the existing systems, applications, and environment; they know the many different people in the organization they will need to deal with to get virtualization done. Remember, alongside the human issues of skill sets, there are the human issues of politics, and existing staff are going to be much better equipped to get them both done. And ultimately, IT needs all of their people to be virtualization people – having a separate ‘virtualization team’ is not sustainable in the long term, so the sooner they get their virtualization team integrated with their existing IT staff, the better.”

The technology, the need and the lure are definitely there. So you better hang that ‘Help Wanted’ sign now and start your search for the existing virtualization experts in the industry or you better start training your existing staff today to create your own in-house experts. Either way, the clock is ticking.