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Anil Chopra
LOS ANGELES: Virtual infrastructure software firm VMware shared the roadmap for its virtualization technology at the VMworld held here last week.
The event indicated that virtualization is no longer confined to the desktop or even a server alone: It has scaled up to a level where it can help enterprises build and manage their entire data centers, as well as their entire desktop fleet; it can help software development houses debug their software more efficiently and it can even help BPOs bury their key security concerns once and for all.
Virtualization holds a lot of promise for all organizations and the top executives of VMware covered various aspects of this throughout the conference.
Diane Greene, president and co-founder of VMware, opened the proceedings by introducing the new concept of virtual appliances. This is a combination of an application and the Operating System.
Contrary to the traditional concept of first installing the OS on the hardware and then the application, a virtual appliance frees both from the underlying hardware. The hardware would instead be running a virtual layer that would be able to accept any virtual appliance.
Greene said that in most x86 systems, the OS controls interfaces to the hardware as well as the software. When the hardware moves forward, the software has to be ported to move forward and the customer has to upgrade and move to new hardware, new OS, as well as a new application. Hence, when one buys the new OS, the applications are actually tied to the processor.
“How archaic is that,” Greene asked.
With a virtualization layer coming in between, the OS becomes an extension of the application stack. Greene further mentioned a few companies that are coming out with such appliances: Microsoft, Oracle and BEA are some of the big names.
This is a profound change in how ISVs build, test, seal, and distribute software, Greene said. If this opportunity is pushed out to a standards body, then customers can buy their software based on its functionality, performance, reliability, and price. Whether this concept succeeds remains to be seen. Meanwhile, one can download 300+ such appliances available on the VMware website.
Virtual Infrastructure
Greene further moved on to the concept of server consolidation. While virtualization is one way of performing server consolidation, VMware has taken it further by introducing their Virtual Infrastructure solution recently. This treats all servers as one large pool of hardware resources, e.g. one has so many GHz of CPU power and so many GBs of memory.
The shared storage is already present in a data center. Now one can simply drop his/her virtual appliances on top of this hardware pool and it will automatically get the resources it needs. The Virtual Infrastructure will handle their grouping, hardware assignment, workload balancing, etc.
If there is a CPU failure, then the Virtual Infrastructure will automatically assign another one to it. This improves application reliability. The virtual infrastructure further lets one migrate virtual machines around, from one hardware to another, even while they’re running.
(VMware hosted the author in Los Angeles)
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