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Virtualization: Tomorrow’s Data Center and Desktop, Today

Virtualization is here today and its impact on data centers and desktops is profound, says Raghu Raghuram

Now more than ever business and IT leaders are faced with the challenges of delivering cost-effective and resilient IT infrastructure that must nimbly adapt to the business. The only certainties most businesses face are uncertainty and change (okay, and taxes). Increasingly, business operations and the applications they rely on are running around the clock. This incredible pace and constant change, not to mention customers–both internal and external, demand higher levels of responsiveness and availability from IT infrastructure than ever before—all this, of course, at lower costs than ever before. Server virtualization is entering the mainstream of business computing precisely because it can help in today’s IT world of feverish change and decreasing budgets.

Virtualization was introduced in the 1960s on mainframe hardware but only recently has emerged to address the vast quantities of highly underutilized x86 servers. These servers are seemingly everywhere—from data centers to hall closets, and they typically house just one application. Virtualization helps solve this costly epidemic of excess capacity by turning one server into ten or twenty by separating the server’s software—its operating system and applications from the underlying physical hardware. This abstraction is possible for desktops and servers and applies to various compute layers including networks and storage. Virtual infrastructure refers to the abstraction of a complete system and its services. Hardware is managed separately from the operating system and applications as a single pool of processing, storage and networking power, which can be dynamically allocated to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them and the administrator manages and optimizes resources globally across the enterprise.

Cost savings are hard to ignore and this is often the first or foremost reason companies virtualize their IT infrastructure. Simply put, virtualization allows users to get much more value out of physical computing resources. Consolidating x86 servers drive up utilization rates from the usual 5-15% to 70-80%. Virtualization takes advantage of the significant oversupply of hardware that is sitting idle. Consolidation also has a trickle-down effect to other hardware and operational cost savings. For e.g., consolidation reduces power, cooling and real estate costs and requires fewer networking switches and cables. Cost savings from virtualization can be significant.  

Even with more utilized physical resources, virtual infrastructure can respond much faster to the business. Virtual machines, which are captured in hardware-independent software files, are inherently more flexible. The results are compelling: new server provisioning and change requests measured in minutes and dynamic workload migration between physical servers with no end user impact are just two examples. The result is increasing flexibility for IT and higher service levels for the business.

Business continuity has become a vital ingredient of IT strategies in a world where businesses rely on IT services 24 hours a day. Whether planned or unplanned, service disruption can be expensive and often fatal to a business. The vast majority of downtime is planned and can be eliminated with virtual machines since they can be moved dynamically from one host to another without service interruption. Unplanned downtime, though much less common, can be very costly for businesses to overcome (if they survive at all).

Resiliency in physical environments requires expensive high availability solutions such as clustering and replicating exact hardware at a different site. Even with these investments, effective recovery is usually untested and uncertain. Business continuity can be much easier to implement and much less expensive in a virtual world. Virtualization encapsulates entire systems into a simple set of files that usually reside on shared storage and can be easily replicated and restored on any target server. Dissimilarities in hardware are no longer an issue. If a server fails, virtual machines automatically restart on other hosts, so all applications in virtual machines are protected for a fraction of the cost.

Another important area for customers is securing and centralizing enterprise desktop management. Customers have been using virtual infrastructure to host virtual machine desktops from a server for several years now. This capability is particularly useful for organizations with remote workers, temporary workers, and test and development teams.

Innovation is also happening around one of the oldest use cases for virtualization—testing and development. Companies have been using virtualization products for years to accelerate test and development. Virtualization decreases the burden of configuring for possible test scenarios and increases the ability to support the growing number of possible operating system combinations. Virtualization can be used to streamline the entire software life cycle, from development through staging and production. Software is tested in a virtual machine and then moves seamlessly into staging and production. Production environments can be easily captured and rolled back as necessary, facilitating the never-ending cycle of testing and updates. The full software life cycle is streamlined and made consistent through the use of standardized virtual machines.

Looking towards the future, virtualization is transforming how software is delivered and consumed with virtual appliances, which are pre-configured virtual machines. These virtual appliances are being developed and delivered to customers today. The operating system is contained in a virtual appliance and runs on virtual infrastructure. These virtual appliances offer a much simpler model. Software vendors find them much less expensive and easier to support. The end customer benefits with vastly easier installation and configuration. Perhaps most importantly, these virtual appliances allow application designers to choose the operating system that is optimal for their application. Applications in need of tight security can have a highly secure operating system while others that have intensive workloads can use an optimized, low overhead operating system. Instead of a one- size-fits-all operating system, the industry will see many operating systems tailored to the applications that they run. This will also result in more stable operating systems as they will be built for specific application loads.

Virtualization is a force for change in a data center near you and in the IT industry. Fortunately, for customers these changes are welcome since they not only reverse the tides of server sprawl and underutilization, giving back needed budget, but make the data center much more flexible and manageable.

The author is Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing, VMware raghu@vmware.com