Hyper-V and the Small Business: Interviewing the Consultant

I’ve done many things in my IT career — enough to carry me full circle through the service provider and service consumer relationship. Some of my best, yet most challenging, years were working as an IT services provider for small businesses. There are a lot of other names for that: field service, field engineering, technical consulting, outsourcing, etc. Whatever you call it when a business doesn’t have its own IT staff or its in-house staff doesn’t have to possess a particular skill set, these are the firms that they hire.

The scenario seems straightforward, but it places the small business in a bind. When you need to fill a knowledge gap, how do you know what questions to ask of a potential consultant to gauge their ability to meet your needs? If you knew that, then you likely wouldn’t have a knowledge gap to fill. I’m going to help you out. I’m going to provide you with the sort of questions that I would ask a potential Hyper-V consultant. I believe that most technical consultants are doing the best job that they can and are not intentionally trying to take advantage of anyone. I want to help you weed out the few so that you don’t become a victim. I’m going to give you some tips on appropriate challenges and expectations to set for firms that vie for your business.

Listen to Your Instincts

Even though I can’t say what percentage of firms are trying to run an honest business, I can certainly say that I’ve encountered many very bad field engineers in my time. Their firms were hired because of unscrupulous management and sales tactics. They operate by the philosophy that, “We don’t need to know that much, we just need to know more than our customers.” If you’re hiring a consulting firm because you’re not good at tech, but you went into business because you’re good with people, then play to your strengths. If you feel like you’re getting snowed or that someone is trying to pull a fast one, then you’re probably right.

Listen to Others

Usually, the really bad tech consulting firms aren’t terribly long-lived. That’s because small business owners talk to each other, and because many of those consulting firms are small businesses themselves. If a consultant makes a habit of not meeting customers’ needs, then word will travel.

Most areas have small business expos and user groups and other gatherings. These are fantastic opportunities to learn about who to hire — and who to avoid.

Specifics, Please

Companies, large and small, that started strong but have begun to flounder in their markets will almost universally fall back to the Popularity Principle (don’t Google that; I just coined it). The Popularity Principle essentially states that: “our drive to produce quality product/work is inversely proportional to our degree of market saturation”, or, “so many people buy our stuff that we don’t need to care if it’s any good.” I was interviewing a representative from a large company once, one whose name that every single person reading this article would recognize, and I asked, “Why should I choose you and not a competitor?” They handed me some printed material with five bullet points pitching their products; three of the five were a variation of the theme, “everyone else buys from us, so you should too.” I told them that wasn’t good enough because I’d left that popularity contest nonsense behind when I graduated high school. That made them angry.

The other two reasons were equally vapid. One was basically, “our company is old” and I don’t remember the fifth. All five of their reasons were rhetorical. All. Five. I pushed them for technical advantages, pricing advantages, anything concrete. They had nothing. They were perplexed when I chose their competitor. I even got the “you’ll rue the day!” warning. Spoiler alert: six years later, I am still perfectly satisfied with my decision.

It’s good that a company has many customers, but I also want to see satisfaction survey results and testimonials. It’s good that a company has been around for a while, but companies, even big ones, can change dramatically in a short period of time. I need those surveys and endorsements. If they’ve got a few customers that are willing to talk to prospects directly, that’s even better.

This all just sets out an important motif that should pervade your entire interview. Rhetoric has no value without backing data. I don’t just need to know what your outfit will do to help me, I need to know why you’re choosing that strategy and why it’s better than alternatives. Large and small topics alike should be supported by solid reasoning. If they can’t concretely answer why they do something, you shouldn’t be able to think of any concrete reason why you should hire them.

Watch for FUD

FUD is easily the quickest way to weed out bad vendors. FUD stands for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” When they can’t give you a good reason for you to buy their stuff, they’ll try to scare you into it instead. FUD is easy to spot. It’s heavy on rhetoric and light on fact. It’s more, “I once knew a guy” and less, “on February 7th, 2014, XYZ Corp…” Two words that pop up frequently in FUD are “always” and “never”. Technology is fluid, everyone’s situation is unique, and there are no magic bullets.

The mark of a good salesperson is the ability to make you believe that you can’t survive without something you didn’t even know existed. Remember that you survived all the way up to today without it; odds are good that you’ll see tomorrow without it.

Remember Who Does What

Usually, you’ll be approached by a sales person. For a very small consulting firm, that person might also be the person that does the technical work. Find out. It’s a rare breed that does sales well and does technical work well. I’ve worked for some people like that; they do exist. They’re just very uncommon. If the person that you’re talking to depends on a technical person or team to do the work, then you must get some time with the technical lead. If they won’t allow that, tell them to move on.

It’s better not to ask too many technical questions of sales staff. They want your business and might make promises that their technical support staff can’t keep. Sometimes it’s because they only see commission dollars. However, out of all the sales people that made a promise that I couldn’t fulfill, most simply overestimated my ability and/or the product’s ability. Granted, my experiences are anecdotal, but I think that most sales staff see their tech teams as wizards that can do just about anything. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, as the saying goes. Just don’t ever put much trust in salespeople’s technical assessments and you’ll probably never go astray.

General Knowledge

If you’re running Hyper-V in your business, then you obviously need someone who knows Hyper-V to help you. Thing is, small businesses are likely to need more than just Hyper-V knowledge from their consultants. Make sure that you touch on all of your needs at some point. Examples:

• Active Directory
• Your e-mail system
• SQL
• Printers
• Networking
• Data backup
• Battery backup
• Your commodity applications (Office suites, etc.)
• Your line of business applications

One of the first questions that I would ask is this: “I have one physical server running Hyper-V. It is a member of our domain and hosts its own domain controller, which is the only domain controller that we have. Are you comfortable supporting that configuration?” If they are not, do not hire them (even if you lied and don’t have that configuration). This question gives insight into two things: the level of Active Directory understanding and the level of Hyper-V understanding. I promise you (and can demonstrate) that this configuration is perfectly valid. It is trivial to set up and maintain. Anyone that will not support it either lacks a basic understanding of at least one of these technologies or wants to sell you software and/or hardware whether you need it or not.

Test for Overzealous Hardware Salespeople

Running a small business can be a challenge, but there are perks. For one thing, small business needs haven’t changed as rapidly as the computer hardware and software landscape. Five years ago, I built a system that ran Microsoft Exchange perfectly well for a few dozen users. Today’s hardware is faster and Exchange’s IOPS requirements have dropped since then, but that company has the same number of users churning about the same amount of e-mail. If someone tried to tell them that they needed more powerful hardware, then we’d immediately know that they were lying.

Since I’m writing a generically targeted blog article, I obviously know absolutely nothing about you or what you need. Someone that you’re just now meeting doesn’t know much more than I do. These are the things to know/watch for:

• Casually ask them to ballpark a new server estimate for you. Even if you really don’t need hardware just yet, it never hurts to know what your next refresh would look like, right? If they start shooting out numbers without asking you questions, do not hire them. No one can properly size a server build in abstract.
• Ask questions about sizing, ex: memory, CPU, disk space. You want to hear things like, “we’ll need to see/assess your system to answer that.” Some firms have builds that they really like and will try to sell to you, regardless of your needs. That’s often because they’ve hit on a system that gives them nice margin-to-serviceability returns. Some consultants will be honest about it, though. They’ll tell you that they have two or three common builds and they’ll help you select the best fit. Since you want your reseller to be comfortable with equipment that they place on your premises, I would not consider that a red flag. If they’ll customize it for your environment, then I wouldn’t be overly concerned.

The purpose of these questions is to determine whether or not the consultant will attempt to build a system based on your needs. Many blindly choose from a list of hardware that makes them a lot of money. A great many hire technical staff that don’t apply critical thinking. I have no problems with a consulting firm that turns a profit, but they must work in their customers’ best interests.

A more practical question: Ask them what would happen if the hardware they sold you should fail irreparably. I prefer firms that have “loaner” equipment on hand and guarantee rapid response. Since we’re talking about Hyper-V here, you don’t need an exact replacement. I’d also be happy to work with a provider that offered to restore your systems to their site and let your staff operate remotely.

The Virtual CPU Test

This one is quick and easy: “I have five virtual machines. Each one has four virtual CPUs. How many physical CPU cores do I need?”

The most correct answer: “I don’t know.” (It’s perfectly fine if they answer in that salesman speak that means, “I don’t know” without using the words, “I don’t know”). The most incorrect answer: “twenty”.

As I said in the preceding section, it’s impossible to size hardware in the abstract. The most accurate way involves performance traces over time. An answer of “twenty” means that this consultant is still sizing virtualization hosts using a 1:1 physical core-to-virtual CPU ratio. That’s wasteful, and you’ll be the one overpaying for it.

Note: it’s OK to change the numbers around, of course, but I can see a consulting recommending at least an 8-core system. That’s because of the way licensing works in 2016; anything less and you’ll be licensing cores that you don’t even own. However, if that’s their drive, that should be part of their answer. The purpose of the question stands.

The Storage Tests

Discussions around storage are where you need to be most vigilantly on guard. Storage is high margin and costs are almost universally inflated. This is what you should expect:

• Vendor A: we’ll sell you a nice SAN for $30,000
• Vendor B: Vendor A charges too much. We’ll charge you $8,000 for commodity equipment and $22,000 for virtual SAN software
• Vendor C: Vendors A and B charge too much. We’ll charge you $4,000 for commodity equipment and $11,000 for virtual SAN software. Minimum purchase: two.

I imagine that most of you are thinking, 30-thousand-whaaa? Yeah, I’ve been there too. I’ve had many vendors try to sell me $30,000 storage solutions to my $10,000 storage problem when I only had an $8,000 storage budget, all claiming, “BUT WE’LL SAVE YOU MONEY!”

Storage Equipment

If you’re running a typical small business, then you probably don’t need a SAN or vSAN software. For a great many of you, simple internal spinning disks will be just fine. A NAS will often do the trick, as will many DAS configurations. I’m liking Storage Spaces as well.

It’s tough to give a lot of great advice in the abstract. Mostly, be wary of anyone that just tries to drop a storage solution on you without even looking at your environment. I was confident in the last storage system that I bought for a medium business because the reseller took the time to do a complete workup of our environment using a tool that I could understand and use without them. They knew exactly what sort of space we needed and exactly what our IOPS requirements were. They helped us plot a growth chart. Only when all of that data was gathered did they talk sales. We bought a storage system that was right-sized for us. We still probably paid too much, but I feel like the vendor worked for that money.

One thing to watch out for is the “SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE!” FUD. Small businesses often utilize a single storage system because almost no 10-user organizations have the budget to support a fully-redundant systems. Single system builds are the small business norm. Failure happens, but it’s rare enough that it’s a good gamble to take on a tight budget. It’s on your vendor to sell you equipment with low failure rates.

Storage Knowledge

This is a “dirty” test just to see what sort of people you’re dealing with: Tell them that you prefer to use RAID-5 in your servers. It doesn’t really matter if you truly want that or not; again, we want to gauge the response. On paper, RAID-5 appears to be an ultra-slow and dead or dying technology. However, that paper was written by people whose margins depend on selling costlier drive systems and is relied upon by people that prefer paper to proof. The truth is that RAID-5 still provides the best performance/usable space/reliability/cost balance in situations where cost weighs highly on the priority scale.

If your interviewee responds, “We never use RAID-5,” be concerned. If they cite performance concerns, that’s a yellow flag. Typical small business server builds are read heavy and have low IOPS requirements, so RAID-5 fits. If they cite URE scares, that’s a red flag.

I wouldn’t want to make this the reason that I chose not to hire a firm, but I would much rather hire someone that knows how to balance risks vs. requirements. What you want to hear is an acknowledgment that they’ve heard your wishes and that they’d like to assess your situation before making any recommendations. Let them know that you expect concrete reasoning on whatever they come back with (and stick to it).

The Networking Test

Resellers really like 10GbE. They make lots of money on it, especially when they also get to sell infrastructure components. It’s also popular with techs, because they read lots of technology blogs and bloggers really like 10GbE. Thing is, most small businesses don’t push their networks very hard. If they’ll test your network and can prove that you need 10GbE, that’s great! But if they won’t test or just insist on 10GbE anyway, then end the interview.

The Memory Test

Ask about Dynamic Memory. Do not hire a vendor that never uses it. It’s true that Dynamic Memory is not universally useful, but the typical small business can get a lot of mileage from it. Domain controllers, file, and print servers put it to great use. Just because memory is relatively cheap these days doesn’t mean you should waste it. Especially when your vendor will make more money by selling you additional memory that you don’t really need.

That said, I tend to overbuy on memory. It’s not expensive enough to justify all the drama that goes along with expanding it later. I would spend the least amount of time on this topic.

The Backup Test

No system is complete without data backup. Period. If it’s not part of the discussion, walk away. Backup is not optional and it cannot be an afterthought.

The “They Read This Article, Too” Test

This particular article is going out on the Internet for anyone to read, including the people that you’re going to be interviewing. That’s OK. If they’ve seen it, at least that’s a sign that they make some effort to stay abreast of the industry that they inhabit. What’s most important is that you, as the potential buyer, have read it. Honest consultants won’t have any problems with it. If they disagree with something, just make them explain why. If I’m wrong about something, I can live with that. I’m always happy to change my opinion in the face of convincing contrary evidence. That said, I’ve been confronted on every single item in this article multiple times. Those confrontations come from anonymous posters using empty rhetoric, theoretical whitepapers, and name-calling, never with concrete countering evidence. That’s what happens when the statistics are on your side.

I wouldn’t recommend that you print this out and make them respond to it. That will come across as accusatory and then they’ll be on the defensive the entire time. Interviewing a consultant should be an interactive experience and you need to be comfortable with each other. I’m not the one that will be hiring or firing them and I’m not the one that they’ll be working with. I placed the “Listen to Your Instincts” section first for a reason. I’m glad to help, but the decision needs to be yours.