1. Have you migrated to a current and supported version of Exchange (that supports the mobility users want with their mobile devices)?
2. When was the last time you audited both the backup and restore elements of your infrastructure?
3. Are you taking full advantage of virtualization in your data center?
4. Can you complete an eDiscovery request from your legal department in an organized manner?
5. Did you kill any weak and resource-draining IT (Information Technology) projects?
6. Do you have a Windows 7 strategy for replacing Microsoft XP?
7. Have you looked at consolidating your data center and actually retiring unneeded applications and their servers?
8. Did you fix any of those vulnerabilities your last security audit discovered?
9. Have you refreshed your storage infrastructure with more efficient and higher capacity equipment?
10. Is your disaster recovery and business continuity plan real or imagined?

The hard, boring work of 2011 might not be as exciting as moving to the cloud or filling your organization with iPads, but isn’t it essential for your business to get the basics working well?

Maybe not. After all, expending extraordinary effort for ordinary gain is how some advance their Information Technology careers.

Where is the sense of urgency?

A sense of urgency is often missing in these boring IT projects but a well-run shop is characterized by few surprises and stable, working (and documented) infrastructure. Not all leaders recognize this and get caught up in the latest trends pushed by the trade press as silver bullets of cost savings and hyper-coolness.

What will you prioritize as important for 2011?

Blaine Berger is the President of E-Oasis and a business and technology veteran with over 25 years of experience. You can contact Blaine via e-mail at blaine@e-oasis.com or connect with Blaine on LinkedIn.

Use a Reference Design

There’s no need to engineer a new design for your VMware infrastructure. Most IT (Information Technology) professionals enjoy the engineering step and the result can be an over-complicated hardware layer that actually inhibits a VMware deployment. Use an existing and proven reference design that scales.

Plan For Storage Growth

Because a VMware infrastructure can scale rapidly, you need to plan for storage growth before deployment. If you already have a SAN (Storage Area Network) or a NAS (Network Attached Storage), now is the time to integrate that storage into your VMware infrastructure.

Use Imaging Software

Loading Virtual Machines from scratch is a poor use of your time. Use readily available imaging software as well as the VMware provided tools to quickly build Virtual Machines as well as migrate a host to a virtual machine.

Choose a Partner

Like every other kind of deployment, choosing the right partner makes all the difference. In addition to access to VMware pricing, the right VMware partner can help you avoid costly mistakes. Avoiding distractions and focusing on issues of scale are key to a rapid VMware deployment.

So whats the big deal? The user desktops are not deployed at their desks. They are virtualized and managed and deployed in the data center. As a result of this, they can be displayed anywhere with the same functionality and the user experience does not change.

There are two points to amplify from Chuck’s post:

1. Thin Clients in this context are the thin client hardware boxes that can display the desktops (and they may well enjoy a resurgence…although the counter argument is that desktop PCs have come down in price and up in features…so why bother?)

2. More importantly, is that if the level of performance for the user can actually be improved…maybe even on-demand (as Chuck alludes), then you’ve got a prescription for a serious revolution in desktop management and total cost of ownership. Especially in large organizations.

It’s no secret that managing desktops for users is a thankless task. Coupled with a never-ending hardware and operating system upgrade cycle, the endless security patching, and the poor track record of desktop backups, the VDI story gets interesting very fast.

For example, if you were fortunate to already have VDI deployed, it would be the fail-safe way to upgrade to Vista with the safety net that Enterprise customers want…specifically being able to fail back to their old (but working) XP desktops without having to physically touch all those desktops.

Of course, you’re going to want a lot of storage and more importantly, you’re going to want the tools that manage that storage well.