Virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.
"Virtualization is hardly a new concept; storage has already been virtualized -- albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures -- and networking is also virtualized," said Philip Dawson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, as both server and PC virtualization become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT."
According to Gartner, the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. Server virtualization is already having an impact on the server market; Gartner believes that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 percent in 2006. As hypervisor prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualization will have a significantly larger impact, and Gartner analysts predict that more than 4 million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.
The use of PC virtualization is also set to increase rapidly. The number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. On the PC, the decoupling technology that breaks the close ties and dependencies between hardware and software occurs at two levels: between hardware and the operating system (machine virtualization) and between the operating system and applications (application virtualization).
Although application virtualization is gaining considerable interest, Gartner maintains that it is machine virtualization that will have a more-long-term impact, making personal computing more manageable, flexible and secure by allowing multiple individual footprints to be defined on the same device.
"Essentially, virtualization creates a fork in the road for operating systems," said Thomas Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Traditionally the operating system has been the center of gravity for client and server computing, but new technologies, new modes of computing, and infrastructure virtualization and automation are changing the architecture and role of the operating system. The days of the monolithic, general-purpose operating system will soon be over."
Infrastructure vendors that have always vied for the largest share of budgets on a best-of breed basis must alter their approach. In the future, the virtualization and automation of infrastructure will be managed by policies at a business-service level, requiring all parts of the infrastructure to work in harmony. This concerns some vendors, which believe a smooth-running and standardized infrastructure threatens to commoditize their component parts and are keen to establish a critical "linchpin" status in the market.
"This competition will play itself out in the market and in users' infrastructure, and it will be messy," said Mr. Dawson. "Eventually a few dominant infrastructure control architectures will emerge, and in those architectures, vendors will solidify a span on control in a hierarchy of governance."
As a result of the uncertainty that will prevail over the market in the short-to-medium term, Mr. Bittman advised against following a specific vendor's vision and instead advised users to determine their own vision of architecture control and build toward it with a constantly updated strategic plan. "In the medium term, align your virtualization strategy with the business, avoid vendor hype and beware of software pricing and licensing," he said. "Be prepared to experiment, but make sure that you are the scientist, not the subject."
Additional information is available in the Gartner Virtualization Special Report on Gartner's Web site at http://gartner.com/it/products/research/virtualization/virtualization .jsp?ref=3_28_08LR This comprehensive Special Report focuses on the impact of virtualization on traditional IT focus areas, as well as future impact and planning aspects. This Special Report links to more than 40 reports across research disciplines.
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Gartner analysts will provide more detailed analysis on the future of virtualization at the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008: Emerging Trends, April 6-10 at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends is Gartner's premier event focused on the emerging trends, technologies, business models and new management thinking poised to have a dramatic impact on business, the economy and society. Thousands of IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises rely on Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends event to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/us/emergingtrends. Members of the media can register by contacting
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Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 75 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com. |
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Million Dollar Data Center |
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Written by Sam Chakkanat
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Virtual Data Center in a box for one million How good is virtualization market? According to Gartner recent Data Center Conference poll 94% of IT organization is going through some sort of virtualization. 80% are either in the process of server consolidation project or have already completed one. Only 3% of the poll respondents had no plans on virtualization. 40% of the polls said their data center run a combination of mainframe, Unix, Linux and windows servers. 25% runs Unix, Linux and windows servers. In an earlier survey of Gartner for enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, on an average there are about 87.4 data center sites. The survey also showed that most of them are looking to reduce this number by 58.8% average. The same story goes with mid-sized organization, with an average 15.3 sites reducing 44.4% to 8.5 sites. Cost versus savings Now, lets break this up in terms of servers. For a mid-size to large enterprises data center, on an average there are 350 servers of all sizes at any time. Alinen research says that on an average 100GB of storage is used by a single server. Comparing only 10% might be a SAN solution. According to Boyd Company recent Most affordable data center market, 2008 research, assuming an average size of 125,000 square feet data center, the annual cost of maintaining can range from $11-12 million, taking only the cost of land, labor, power and property taxes. VMWare TCO calculator shows 50% or more TCO savings on server and infrastructure consolidation savings in a given 3 year time. Solution in a box Here is a simple solution how you could consolidate your servers. In any organization, no matter how you interpret, the heart beat of any day is communication, and the most preferred way is email. An email Exchange virtualization is much easy way to start your server consolidation initiative. Other categories are your development, test and QA, backup and batch processing servers. These are servers that you utilize very minimal in your daily business cycle. Reference Architecture By consolidating all the high end servers into a virtual framework you could reduce or replace your low capacity servers by 50% or more. The high-end servers in combinations with SAN solution could create a high available and reliable solution in a box as show in Figure above. You could now extend this into a symmetric architecture to enable maximum availability architecture. Assuming Sun Fire x4100 series or Dell Power Edge 2900 series, and using VMWare solutions you could start putting an efficient and affordable data center solution in a box for one million. About the author: Sam Chakkanat has been in management consulting industry since 1992. Prior to founding CEAUG, he was the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture practice at Agilex Technologies, servicing fortune 500 clients. Before that he was Enterprise Solution Architect and consulting manager at Oracle Consulting at their Platform and Performance Solution Architecture Group and had architect and managed multi-million dollar programs and business technology initiatives for clients. Mr.Chakkanat holds a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from Pune University. He serves as a though leader and subject matter expertise in multiple domains in IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture. He can be reached through our contact forum. |
What is Virtualization? Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute.
Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware. Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer, from IT professionals and Mac enthusiasts to commercial businesses and government organizations. Join the millions of people around the world who use virtualization to save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer hardware they already own.
Discover what virtualization can do for you. How Does Virtualization Work? In essence, virtualization lets you transform hardware into software. Use software such as VMware ESX to transform or “virtualize” the hardware resources of an x86-based computer—including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller—to create a fully functional virtual machine that can run its own operating system and applications just like a “real” computer.
Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with each other so that you can safely run several operating systems and applications at the same time on a single computer. The VMware Approach to Virtualization The VMware approach to virtualization inserts a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This software layer creates virtual machines and contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it.
However, virtualizing a single physical computer is just the beginning. VMware offers a robust virtualization platform that can scale across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure. History of Virtualization Virtualization is a proven concept that was first developed in the 1960s to partition large, mainframe hardware. Today, computers based on x86 architecture are faced with the same problems of rigidity and underutilization that mainframes faced in the 1960s. VMware invented virtualization for the x86 platform in the 1990s to address underutilization and other issues, overcoming many challenges in the process.
Today, VMware is the global leader in x86 virtualization and has achieved success that is building momentum for virtualization in all x86 computers. In the Beginning: Mainframe Virtualization Virtualization was first implemented more than 30 years ago by IBM as a way to logically partition mainframe computers into separate virtual machines. These partitions allowed mainframes to “multitask”: run multiple applications and processes at the same time. Since mainframes were expensive resources at the time, they were designed for partitioning as a way to fully leverage the investment. The Need for x86 Virtualization Virtualization was effectively abandoned during the 1980s and 1990s when client-server applications and inexpensive x86 servers and desktops established the model of distributed computing. Rather than sharing resources centrally in the mainframe model, organizations used the low cost of distributed systems to build up islands of computing capacity. The broad adoption of Windows and the emergence of Linux as server operating systems in the 1990s established x86 servers as the industry standard. The growth in x86 server and desktop deployments has introduced new IT infrastructure and operational challenges. These challenges include: - Low Infrastructure Utilization. Typical x86 server deployments achieve an average utilization of only 10% to 15% of total capacity, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm. Organizations typically run one application per server to avoid the risk of vulnerabilities in one application affecting the availability of another application on the same server.
- Increasing Physical Infrastructure Costs. The operational costs to support growing physical infrastructure have steadily increased. Most computing infrastructure must remain operational at all times, resulting in power consumption, cooling and facilities costs that do not vary with utilization levels.
- Increasing IT Management Costs. As computing environments become more complex, the level of specialized education and experience required for infrastructure management personnel and the associated costs of such personnel have increased. Organizations spend disproportionate time and resources on manual tasks associated with server maintenance, and thus require more personnel to complete these tasks.
- Insufficient Failover and Disaster Protection. Organizations are increasingly affected by the downtime of critical server applications and inaccessibility of critical end user desktops. The threat of security attacks, natural disasters, health pandemics and terrorism has elevated the importance of business continuity planning for both desktops and servers.
- High Maintenance end-user desktops. Managing and securing enterprise desktops present numerous challenges. Controlling a distributed desktop environment and enforcing management, access and security policies without impairing users’ ability to work effectively is complex and expensive. Numerous patches and upgrades must be continually applied to desktop environments to eliminate security vulnerabilities.
The VMware Solution: Full Virtualization of x86 Hardware In 1999, VMware introduced virtualization to x86 systems as a means to efficiently address many of these challenges and to transform x86 systems into general purpose, shared hardware infrastructure that offers full isolation, mobility and operating system choice for application environments. Challenges & Obstacles to x86 Virtualization Unlike mainframes, x86 machines were not designed to support full virtualization, and VMware had to overcome formidable challenges to create virtual machines out of x86 computers.
The basic function of most CPUs, both in mainframes and in PCs, is to execute a sequence of stored instructions (ie, a software program). In x86 processors, there are 17 specific instructions that create problems when virtualized, causing the operating system to display a warning, terminate the application, or simply crash altogether. As a result, these 17 instructions were a significant obstacle to the initial implementation of virtualization on x86 computers.
To handle the problematic instructions in the x86 architecture, VMware developed an adaptive virtualization technique that “traps” these instructions as they are generated and converts them into safe instructions that can be virtualized, while allowing all other instructions to be executed without intervention. The result is a high-performance virtual machine that matches the host hardware and maintains total software compatibility. VMware pioneered this technique and is today the undisputed leader in virtualization technology. Discover the Value of Virtualization Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer. Millions of people and thousands of organizations around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use VMware virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Read below to discover how virtualization can benefit your organization. Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software - Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy “one application to one server” model.
- Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.
- Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance.
- Increased Application Availability & Improved Business Continuity: Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.
- Improved Desktop Manageability & Security: Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC
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