Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Today's Miracles
You return from lunch on Friday to a frantic voicemail from one of the department heads in your
company. An initiative has been underway to overhaul a major application that the department
depends on. A consultant is coming in on Monday morning to deploy the application in an isolated
development environment. h ere has been discussion about creating this environment but it has
not been done yet. Naturally, you protest but agree to work through the weekend to prepare the new
environment. h at weekend can go dramatically diff erent depending on the amount of automation
implemented in your environment.
If you have automated the deployment of new virtual machines, implementation of new VLANs,
addition of accounts, and access permissions, you may be able to accomplish the task within a few
hours. If you do not have automation you will likely spend many hours implementing the solution
manually and missing weekend activities. You are also likely to make mistakes or miss steps that
can impact the confi dence that the department head and your management have in you. In the
end, you know you'll accomplish the task, but the amount of eff ort required will vary. Regardless of
what it takes the department head sees the result and assumes that this is repeatable. As such, you
will likely be put on the spot again in the future and doomed to repeat the eff ort. Today's miracles
are tomorrow's expectations.
Figure 14.6
h e vCenter folder
contains all the
workfl ows that
automate actions in
vCenter Server.
