VMware admins possess the IT skills needed in a down economy

With unemployment rates topping 10 percent, IT professionals with virtualization skills are in high demand and earning top dollar

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Those individuals with virtualization skills and cloud expertise can earn a much higher salary right now compared to professionals in other areas of IT. Virtualization technology is maturing and spreading throughout datacenters, and the skills needed to implement and operate it are currently in high demand.

Despite a down economy, virtualization has proven itself recession resilient. Server virtualization has altered the way people manage the datacenter, and it's become a fundamental technology for many organizations. But purchasing virtualization software and licenses is only a small slice of the duties. Deciding how to architect and implement your assets, as well as how to manage them on an ongoing basis is a much bigger chunk of the pie, and finding people with that knowledge or ability may not be as easy as you would imagine.

[ Find out if having years of virtualization experience or a VMware VCP 3 certification is enough, or if you should upgrade to a vSphere 4 certification. | VMware removes obstacles to adopting vSphere 4 by releasing SRM 4.0 adding support for vSphere 4, NFS, and vCenter Linked Mode. ]

Last September, the analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released a research report on virtualization that found a lack of skills or knowledge was the No. 1 barrier to success with virtualization, while lack of time and/or people was third at 36 percent. According to Andi Mann, VP of research at EMA, these findings are consistent with EMA research going back to early 2006, with skills being one of the top three issues every time.

In spite of that problem, more and more enterprises are deploying virtualization, and they're doing so to more and more servers. Mann stated:

In the average organization, only around 25 percent of servers are actually virtualized, but that rate is growing every year. As a result, skills shortages are actually getting worse -- not better -- in 2008, only 31 percent of enterprises definitely had the skills they needed to manage their virtual deployments, down from 47 percent in 2006. In 2009, there are more experts, but there is even higher demand, yet budget cuts mean that training has not kept pace.