Wake up!
You are a cost center.

OK. I've been doing this for almost 20 years and known that bit of info for almost 20 years.

You exist only to enable productive people to produce more efficiently.
You aren't in charge of anything.

Besides the networks, backups, security, servers you mean I'm not in charge of anything?

You work for us.
Continue to annoy us and you will be replaced.

And vice-versa, baby.

Just like the guy in the tool room that used to guard the pin gauges and the hammers like he owned them.
And the facilities guy who refused to add a 30 Amp circuit or run a Nitrogen line.
The IT support model that treats everyone like a serf doing word processing is over.

Um, OK. I figure no matter what happens or how nice I am that eventually most businesses will not have internal IT staff. The march of technology demands this, usually.

The design engineers need nonstandard hardware to do modeling. They might even need multiple computers.

Cool. Not a problem. Give me the money and I'll have that for you. It's always been about the money, you know.

In fact every individual user has specific and unusual needs that they understand better than you do.

I'd love that to be true. Fact is that most of my users don't understand what they need or how to improve the technology. The most I hope for is that they understand their own tools better than I, because they use said tools while I don't, but only a few even manage that.

And it's Not your call. Make it happen or go extinct. Computers aren't a new special thing anymore.
Many of us users understand every aspect of your network as well or better than you do,

Bah hah hah hah!

Hey, this is your turf, and I understand that change is hard, and that you need to grumble, bitch, rant, whatever.
get it all out. It won't change anything though.

Right back at ya', homey. The network is secure because the company's lawyers and the company's insurers demand it. The data is secured for the same reasons. Me, I don't care in the slightest. I do this job for money, not love and certainly not the love of annoying people.

The antonym of "secure" is not "insecure" but instead "accessible". When e-mail became popular it was common practice to have an address that would send a message to everyone in the company -- that was abused so became restricted. Address books were available with everyone's contact information -- that was abused so became restricted. Databases accepted connections with empty "sa" passwords (no joke) -- that was abused so became restricted.

Notice a fucking pattern?

My job boils down to keeping the stuff running and keeping it secure. Someone wants to access the systems with some new toy I only ask two questions -- does it break the systems? does it break security? The business, by the way, asks just one question -- how much?

I assume you mean that you think it irresponsible to be running Windows in a virtuallized environment? If so, I hate to tell you this but I'm seeing more and more companies, some with very large and capable tech staff, doing just that. At first it was for testing and development, true, but it just became easier to copy the image files onto the production VM serves. I even know of one credit union that has ALL production Windows servers as VMs.

The ease of backups-restores is one big reason for the love being directed at VM servers. Just shut the machine down, copy some files, and boom! a point-in-time backup. Moving an application from testing to production, same things as a backup with just loading the files into a new VMWare (banks require physical separation of hardware between development/testing/production so these files are actually copied to a new VMserver).

To be honest, I'm an old systems admin, too, and thought VMs were just for testing and development and was a bit disturbed to see big, careful companies using them for production. Worse, I'm a consultant installing some heavy Windows applications that can overwhelm even beefy machines and virtuallizing my servers just slows them down. I am not privy to the reasons for why the move to VMs but I think management was getting tired of all the problem tickets that amounted to "hardware problem with ServerX, moving to new hardware -- 20 hours". (Yeah, way too long to move a server, but at large institutions everything takes longer than it should; in my network, creating a new VM image takes about 15 minutes, with the procedures and paperwork at the credit union this will take 2 hours and require 5 people be involved.)

--ibbieta