Technical Support - Is virtualization technology overwhelming suppliers?

In the post Virtualization - Don’t Forget Technical support we explored the notion that technical support is often forgotten in an organization's rush to deploy virtualization technology of one sort or another.

To the lab!

In most cases, system and major software suppliers were forced long ago to construct a sophisticated test lab that houses each and every one of the configurations that they’re supporting or plan to support. Regression testing is done on each configuration. This may mean changing I/O devices, graphic adapters, storage adapters and network adapters many times during the test runs. This may also mean loading and unloading various software components that are likely to be found in a customer’s environment.

Only after tests are run successfully on each of these configurations can a product or support for a product be launched. All observed anomalies or issues must either have been resolved or “work arounds” found and documented for their own internal support team. The internal support team must be trained. Training materials must be prepared for partners’ support teams. Sales literature must be prepared for both internal and external sales representatives. As you can see, this can be a long, very expensive task.

It is clear that if a configuration has not been tested, it is unlikely that the supplier can or will offer support.

No supplier, no matter how large, has the capability of testing every concievable configuration that might be found in the market place.

Virtualization Technology Expands Technical Challenges

Virtual environments add another layer to this already complex environment. Furthermore, there are six layers of virtualization technology found in industry standard datacenters today and several choices at each layer (if you're interested in the Kusnetzky Group model of virtualization technology please read Sorting out the different layers of virtualization). Because this technology potentially can add a great deal of time and expense to an already intensive process, many suppliers have not included a broad array of these technologies in their testing regimen.

It might also be mentioned that major suppliers may simply be unaware of innovative or interesting products that are being offered by smaller vendors or vendors from other geographic regions.

Even without the addition of virtualization technology, nearly all enterprise software vendors have been facing support challenges for quite some time. Their technical support policies are now being challenged by the onset of virtualization software in the industry standard datacenter.

Every day something new emerges in one of the layers of virtualization technology. When one considers that there are over 100 different suppliers offering a broad array of virtualization products, it's no wonder that system suppliers often haven't tested every possible combination of these products.

Supporting Their Own Products Has Been The Story

The suppliers of this technology are happy to point out that they’ll support their technology but they simply do not have the ability to support the operating systems, database managers, application frameworks and applications supplied by others.

Often these suppliers will provide reasonable attempts to isolate and fix a problem in a complex environment for their biggest and most influencial customers. Others are simply told that if they can reproduce the problem in a vendor-only environment that their issue will be examined. If not, they're on their own.

How many IT organizations know how their major suppliers will respond in a challenging situation? What's clear to see is that the rapid emergence of new technology is overwhelming the software industry’s ability to respond in several areas including software licensing and technical support.