I/O a Concern for Virtualised Servers

By Greg McNevin

December 4, 2007: A new virtualisation survey conducted by Xsigo has found that I/O connectivity is a major concern for IT departments for fortune 5000 companies.

The firm canvassed the opinions of over 100 IT staff members at Fortune 5000 companies using server virtualization, with many citing server connectivity challenges as a major concern.

Xsigo says it found that IT managers encounter significant cost and cabling issues when configuring connectivity on servers running virtualization software, as opposed to traditional servers, virtualised servers are being configured with more connections, and those configurations are being changed more frequently – two factors that significantly drive up costs.

This situation is only expected to get worse as reliance on virtualisation increases, particularly considering virtualisation server shipments are growing at close to 41 percent a year according to IDC, with 1.7 million units expected to be shipped annually by 2010.

Xsigo says today’s data centre I/O infrastructure was designed for traditional server usage, not virtualized server implementations. It claims that because users often prefer dedicated connectivity for individual virtual machines, servers frequently require additional I/O.

A simple problem, like having a server with six I/O ports when seven is needed in order to accommodate virtualization capabilities, can add significant capital and labour expenses to a data centre.

The company found that 75 percent of virtualization users configure seven or more I/O connections per server, compared to two to four connections for a server running without virtualization software. This increases the potential for I/O bottlenecks, and according to Xsigo can increase the cost of configuring server I/O for virtualized servers so much they exceed the cost of the server itself.

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