The ITvirtualisationproduct market is
expanding rapidly in both reach and range. On the client side,
established desktop and application virtualisation products are
being joined by new offerings that are pushing the boundaries of
what can be achieved in this space.
Storage virtualisation is another market reaching maturity,
with standards agreed and leaders identified. However, the server
virtualisation market is still in a state of flux, even with its
well-known suppliers.
Here, interoperability may be a major hurdle to overcome for
early adopters. Moving from physical to virtual might appear to be
straightforward on paper or in the lab, but the migration of live
applications into a virtual environment presents a very real set of
challenges.
Virtualisation now operates across a much wider spectrum than
just x86 server virtualisation. It encompasses networks, storage,
applications, desktop and servers. By combining these technologies,
organisations can realise significant benefits, and transform their
IT infrastructure from a static to a dynamic resource that can help
enable the business to meet its strategic goals.
Beyond
server consolidation
This new approach extends beyond just thinking about the
traditional view of IT virtualisation - meaning server
consolidation - and it is increasingly being seen by CIOs as a
solution to breaking the rigid links between applications,
hardware, platforms and middleware, and end-users. Using this
approach, the IT department is able to meet the demand that the
business is placing upon it.
Many organisations initially adopt IT virtualisation in order to
save costs through server consolidation, but soon realise that
other benefits are possible when operating with a virtualised
infrastructure, and so IT virtualisation then becomes a strategic
part of the overall IT plan.
Server virtualisation technologies operate by using one of three
basic methods:
● Emulation, where one resource imitates another resource.
● Partitioning, where a large resource appears as many smaller
resources.
●
Clustering,
where many resources appear as one large resource.
The use of these capabilities and technologies has developed
widely different applications, and many organisations will have
different examples of these technologies within datacentres.
Extract maximum benefit
Understanding these capabilities and how their usage differs is
key to organisations extracting the maximum benefit from its server
infrastructure. The low and mid-range server market is the area
that receives most coverage in terms of the different techniques
used in server virtualisation.
Emulation is the approach taken because the IA-32 instruction
set used in the x86 architecture was not designed for
virtualisation. There are two principal approaches to virtualising:
hypervisors -
"bare metal" virtualisation - and hosted virtualisation, where the
guest operating system sits atop an existing operating system.
Partitioning is a proprietary technology to allow
enterprise-class servers can be transformed from large, monolithic
computing engines to multiple, smaller resources, thereby
increasing utilisation figures and enabling organisations to obtain
better returns on their IT investments.
Clustering technologies can be used for a number of different
purposes depending on the organisation's exact requirements. The
primary reason behind the deployment of clusters is to provide high
availability of systems, but there are also other reasons.
These include network load balancing, which enables scaling for
web applications high-performance clustering, which was
traditionally used in scientific and research scenarios, but is
increasingly becoming accepted in the commercial market and
internal grid computing, which uses the organisation's existing
resources to perform many parallel actions.
Utilising storage virtualisation
Storage virtualisation helps organisations manage their storage
resources more efficiently in order to achieve higher utilisation
rates.
It was developed predominantly to work in
storage area network (San) environments, where the high costs
of implementing a San in the early days of this technology were
compounded by poor utilisation rates.
The technology has developed rapidly since it was first
introduced by early adopters, and it now offers organisations much
more flexibility, as it allows them to use virtualisation as part
of their information life-cycle management strategy.
Evolving desktops
Desktop virtualisation is an area that has witnessed significant
advances in recent years, evolving from the
thin-client technologies first introduced in the late 1990s to
the server-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) systems of
today. These systems provide most of the benefits of a traditional
PC, but with greatly reduced management needs and total cost of
ownership.
VDI will appeal greatly to those organisations seeking a more
manageable yet flexible desktop environment. However, the removal
of desktops and laptop computers requires a significant cultural
change, and so it will take some time before VDI becomes
pervasive.
● Roy Illsley is a senior analyst at research firm Butler
Group