The sector will reach the SMBs

Virtualisation is not new, the concept of abstraction of computer resources from the operating system, application and the user through the creation of a virtual machine is not new, it was available on the IBM System/360 Model 67 mainframe in the 1960s. When it comes to the client/server world, however, the one innovation that defines the technological landscape of the early 21st century may well be virtualisation.

VMware’s senior product marketing manager Asia Pacific, Andre Kemp, said that virtualisation on the x86 platform has a long pedigree. “Virtualisation first started when Microsoft introduced VxD drivers, which abstracted the actual application from talking directly to the hardware. It was really the first taste that the end-user was given towards something virtual, although the word virtual has been around for decades.

“VMware started in Australia in 2004 and to start off with there was a lot education [that needed to be done to explain to the market], what VMware is, what it can do etc. We started off in the test and development arena. But we’ve quickly moved from ‘this is a cool test/development technology’ straight into production and in 2006 in Asia Pacific we saw a definite trend, organisations felt that the product was production-ready and started deploying it straight into production.”

Over the past five years in particular, virtual storage and servers have moved off the leading edge and into the mainstream to mix a metaphor. The main driver has been an overarching trend towards server consolidation with its advantages of higher utilisation rates, lower management overheads as well as power consumption. Of all these factors, increased hardware utilisation was the initial driver, said Gen-i virtualisation specialist Safi Obeidullah, and the other factors became important later.

“The main drivers for virtualisation are around server consolidation, business continuity and streamlining test and development environments. The advantages of going down the virtualisation path include increased hardware utilisation. There have been many studies over the past few years that show most servers, particularly on the Windows platform, are significantly underutilised, with some coming in at under 10 percent. Virtualisation provides an approach that maximises the utilisation of hardware, while at the same time increasing the availability and redundancy of the environment.”
Getronics Microsoft Solutions manager, Brett Lightfoot, believes that the advantages of virtualisation “are that running a multitude of operating systems on a common hardware layer reduces operational complexity. Sharing resources across multiple virtual machines provides a high level of end-user service and assists to reduce power consumption. Complex test and development environments can be built reliably again and again; a major advantage over building servers manually. In production extra machines can be added in minutes to increase processing power – whether it’s for an end-of- month spike or a large project”.

All technology, however, is subject to the law of unintended consequences and virtualisation is not a total silver bullet. It does have some disadvantages, said Infoplex managing director, Sean Kaye. “It takes time, money and a lot of skilful planning to put in place the right supporting foundations. If you get it wrong, which is easy to do considering the complexity of these things, then you’re in trouble.”

Lightfoot adds, “One of the great disadvantages is because of the ease of creating new virtual machines it is very easy to end up with a plethora of virtual machines. This is a side effect of making any technology so easy to use and is easily rectified with appropriate processes. A solid change management discipline needs to apply to any virtualised environment.”

Disaster recovery is becoming an increasingly important aspect of organisation’s deployment of virtualisation, said Platespin’s senior director product management, John Stetic. “The early adopters are now starting to realise the benefit of having the encapsulation and portability of a virtual machine which makes it easy to back up and restore or recover in a different place. This gives you high availability to all the workloads that are running on one virtual machine server without having to worry about the individual guest operating systems themselves.”

When it comes to future trends, everyone CRN spoke to for this piece believes that virtualisation will continue to grow, moving from the large to the medium enterprise and eventually into small businesses. In part, this will be driven by the commodisation of the hypervisor, said Obeidullah. “Hardware vendors such as HP, IBM, and Dell are all offering servers with the hypervisor already built in. The focus for companies such as Microsoft, VMware and Citrix will be on providing tools to manage, optimise and support virtual platforms. [There will also be] major developments around utility computing. Virtualisation is a key enabler of the utility model by eliminating the dependency on dedicated hardware. Hardware is simply seen as a pool of processors, memory and storage that can be used as the server needs it.”

Linked with the growing popularity of the utility computing model will be the evolution of closer integration and harmonisation between server and storage virtualisation technologies, said Hitachi Data Systems ANZ chief technologist, Simon Elisha. “Innovations such as thin provisioning drive power down and additional scalability improvements will continue to drive adoption of virtualised storage technologies. Further, more and more scalable solutions will be available.”

Kaye believes that virtual I/O will be the next frontier. “Cabling and the infrastructure around it need to become easier to manage. Whether that is with Fibre Channel over Ethernet and emulation of other media or full emulation end to end with InfiniBand, that trend will grow. The development of improved management tools will also be an ongoing trend. The vendors do a great job now, but it really can improve substantially to improve provisioning and monitoring at the high-end and enterprise level.”