Virtual Reality | The new generation
of virtualisation technology presents a compelling
proposition
For an approach to managing technology resources
that is over 35 years old, virtualisation is currently
enjoying a remarkable surge in take-up, with the
technology driving server strategy, data centre decisions,
desktop policy and even parts of the corporate green
agenda. Quite simply, it has become the hottest technology
in the IT market.
By providing a layer of abstraction that hides the
physical computing resource from an application or
end user, it masks complexity and enables much more
efficient utilisation of resources.
The term has been around since the mainframes of
the 1970s, when it allowed a single physical machine
to be split into multiple virtual machines, each
capable of running its own operating system. Today,
however, its rapid adoption has been primarily driven
by the desire to virtualise the farms of x86-based
servers that most organisations have built up in
recent years. These workhorses of the corporate data
centre have hitherto been seen as a cheap and easy
way to satisfy hunger for enterprise processing power.
But with each server usually allocated to running
a single application, utilisation rates have been
dismal: often running as low as 5% and 10% of capacity.
Through the use of virtualisation technology, IT
managers have been able to push up utilisation rates
to 50% or above – thereby getting more ‘bang
for their buck’ and freeing up precious data
centre space – by consolidating workload on
fewer machines.
As well as providing a cost-effective method of increasing
available processing power, the widespread use of
server virtualisation has other benefits. Virtual
machines can be brought online and offline with far
greater ease and at much less risk than having to
provision individual physical assets - succour for
businesses seeking a flexible and responsive, service-oriented
applications infrastructure.
Teaching new dogs old tricks
But enthusiasm for virtualisation is not just confined
to x86 servers. As well as still being a key component
of mainframes, it is also being widely deployed in
Unix environments. Moreover, virtualisation is now
a mainstream mechanism within storage.
In that context, virtualisation has been used to
simplify storage management, improve resource utilisation
and ensure high availability. It can provide a single
console which allows administrators to provision,
configure, monitor and manage a pool of physical
storage, without being constrained by the capacity
limits of a standalone array. Yet again, it is not
a new concept – storage virtualisation has
been widely deployed in enterprise arrays and across
enterprise storage area networks – although
it was more commonly given names such as volume or
RAID management. The real change in storage virtualisation
in recent years, though, has been the ability to
apply the technology across a heterogeneous systems
environment.
Nonetheless, while virtualisation has won many new
converts, it is far from being a universal panacea
for all of IT’s woes. Adding a layer of abstraction
between applications and physical machines, businesses
can find manageability actually reduces.
Currently, the systems management tools deployed
to monitor the enterprise IT infrastructure were
not built with virtualisation in mind. A common complaint
is that configuration database management tools – a
lynchpin of best practice frameworks such as ITIL – do
not work properly in dynamic virtual environments.
The indications are that the management tools will
improve significantly over the next 18 months,
and this should increase the benefits end-users
can reap
from virtualisation by increasing the degree to
which the environments can be set up automatically.
Ultimately, virtualisation will redefine the economics
of managing an IT operation.
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