Virtual Machines, Virtually Everywhere
Virtual Machines, Virtually Everywhere
July 3, 2007: It’s nice when you’ve developed a technology that’s so hot you don’t need to market it. For a vendor like VMware, it’s services appear to have change the market so much, it’s the analysts, customers and partners creating its ever-expanding market.
The most talked about advantage of VMWare’s application in the enterprise is server consolidation, particularly in large scale environments such as a data centre. By partitioning a server, the IT department can pack multiple applications that used to require a dedicated server onto one. Typically this means achieving server utilisation rates of 80 rather than 20 per cent.
This capability and its deployment in the enterprise space have put virtualisation in the ‘cool’ class. More interesting however are the changes occurring as a consequence of virtualisation’s normalisation in the market.
At Gartner’s Data Centre Summit 2007, Gartner vice president Thomas Bittman said, “It [virtualisation] is now less about the technology and more about process change and cultural change within organisations. Virtualisation enables alternative delivery models for services. Each virtualised layer can be managed relatively independently or even owned by someone else, for example, streamed applications or employee-owned PCs. This can require major cultural changes for organisations.”
Gartner estimates that the total number of virtual machines deployed worldwide is expected to increase from 540,000 at the end of 2006 to more than 4 million by 2009. It’s the tip of the iceberg really and Brittman believes that the almost free availability of VMWare’s “hypervisor technology” (designed to allow administrators to move virtualised machines without shutting them down, thereby opening up the possibility for policy-based movement between machines to meet fluctuating processing demand) will accelerate this trend.
The French Connection
Reza Malekzadeh, VMWare’s “number 10 man”, the France-based Director of International Product Marketing & Alliances recently visiting Australia for VMWare’s Technical Future Exchange conference for partners, said in an interview with IDM that “the most critical benefit we bring is disassociation between hardware and software.”
In the enterprise arena, the complexity of business applications and need to keep servers running independently in order to protect critical business functions – financial databases, web servers, e-commerce engines – has often meant introducing dedicated servers for each function. With virtualisation, this has all changed.
Up to now, reducing hardware costs have made it more cost effective to buy new servers as required. But according to Malekzadeh the space and heat conundrum remain. On top of this, the cost of maintenance is increasing.
But really, in Australia, is reducing heat and power a critical factor for virtualisation’s uptake? We’ve all heard about it from a US perspective - where the costs for power are significant - but with the availability of cheap electricity in Australia, are energy costs critical to the decision to virtualise?
Malekzadeh says France is in a very similar situation to Australia. He says, “We use more nuclear power so power in France is cheap. Overall, people are now thinking in terms of ecology, so even if power is cheap there’s no reason to wait. Secondly, even where there is more power to use, there is maximum local capacity. There are data centres that are completely filled up and operators need to know how to add capacity. Even if you do have cheap power, they know how much it costs to build a new data centre. The third reason is that over the last couple of years, operating expenses have started growing and becoming more important than capital expenditure. But it’s not just about power savings – we’re really bringing better utilisation to resources and customers are typically swapping lower end infrastructure for higher end equipment, which allows you to have better equipment but less of it while still run same workload.”
The future of virtualisation
What started as a product will become an infrastructure platform and an “architectural decision” according to Malekzadeh. He says, “It’s really about the architecture of your IT infrastructure and the processes around it…. As you move forward, you’re pooling your resources and taking your equipment and building a mainframe out of it and using virtualisation as your glue.”
The second big evolution will be a modification of the role of the operating system. Thus far the operating system has served to manage hardware and expose interfaces so an application can access hardware. “As hardware becomes more heterogenous,” says Malekzadeh , “the operating system needs more device drives and pieces to take it into account so it’s becoming one fat piece of bloated code. Also APIs are becoming more complex.”
One company out there dealing with this problem is BEA, which has released a pre-built virtualised machine with an optimised operating system that users don’t install, but simply copy to their PC. Malekzadeh says virtualised machines are becoming a unit to distribute software applications. Others like Citrix and NEC have taken VMWare’s technology to re-introduce the concept of thin-computing to the enterprise. Meanwhile, companies like Australian-based Smarty Host have used virtualisation to change the pricing model for hosting servers, enabling greater flexibility to meet peaks and troughs in demands for processing power.