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Have A Happy 'Virtual' Year!

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PCQ Bureau
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Virtualization has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the

IT circle for quite some time now. Out of the three types of virtualization that

are possible (server, network and storage), server virtualization saw a lot of

action last year. Simply speaking, the technology allows you to run multiple OSs

on the same physical hardware simultaneously. It could either be based on

hardware partitioning, wherein each OS sees its own dedicated hardware, viz CPU,

RAM, HDD, BIOS, I/O devices, etc; or it could be based on OS partitioning,

wherein the virtualization layer will run multiple threads of the same OS as the

base OS. Virtualization technology has many benefits, which really make it worth

considering. One is that it reduces the clutter of servers in your data center.

So instead of having a separate physical server for your database, file serving,

Web and other applications, you'll have a single server that runs all of them,

but in their own 'virtual' domains. One immediate interpretation of this is

that you'll need very powerful hardware to be able to do this. Yes, the

hardware specs do go up, but that doesn't mean you need a supercomputer for

it. You would need additional storage capacity for all the OSs and their

applications. You'll also need to provide the recommended RAM requirements for

each application. But you could use the same processor(s). The reason for this

is simple. Take an existing scenario of having different physical servers for

each application. Here, it's not as if each server's computing power will be

utilized 100% all the time. There would be times when they'll be idle, times

when they'd be moderately used and times when they'll undergo peak

utilization. If you combine just the idle time of all the servers in your data

center, then you'll discover a huge amount of unutilized capacity sitting in

your data center, all going waste. With virtualization, multiple applications

will run on the same physical server. By and large, it's unlikely that

they'll be utilized to the maximum all the time. Some would peak at one time,

while others would peak at other times. So the average utilization of the

physical server will go up, thereby reducing the wasted capacity.

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Virtualization technology offers a lot of business

benefits, which definitely make it a worthy candidate to consider for your data

center. Since it reduces the number of servers, it saves a lot of precious floor

space in the data center. Since servers have to be up 24x7, having fewer servers

means lesser power consumption and air-conditioning requirements. This

translates to direct cost saving in electricity bills. Virtualization also leads

to lesser administrative overheads, as more servers can be controlled from a

single console. It also helps you roll out new servers more quickly, as all

you'd be doing is replicating copies of your virtual machines, which is much

faster than setting up a fresh server and loading everything from scratch. This

also helps in testing applications for patches, updates, and upgrades before

rolling them out. Data centers aren't the only beneficiaries of

virtualization. It's also useful for developers, who need to test all their

code. Instead of testing on their base OS, they could do it on a virtual

machine, and reduce downtime. It could also be used by consultants for

demonstrating their solutions to clients.

While virtualization can lead to lots of business benefits

and help you consolidate your data center, it requires careful planning while

deploying. For one, since multiple applications are running on the same physical

hardware, downtime can be disastrous. If the physical server goes down, all your

applications would go down. Earlier, it would only have been a single

application going down. So, you would need to plan for some redundancy, perhaps

a fail-over server. Likewise, all virtual machines would need close monitoring.

It shouldn't happen that one of them hogs up all the resources, leaving others

hunting for compute cycles. The virtualized environment has to be design very

carefully, and tuned for performance. Migration to a virtual environment isn't

easy either, especially if you have your own home-grown applications running in

your existing environment. These would be tuned for the existing hardware, and

would require considerable development effort if migrated to a virtual

environment.

So is virtualization here to stay? Absolutely. You'll see

lots of action in this space in the coming year. Currently, most of the action

is in the virtualization software domain, with both commercial and open-source

solutions available. In hardware virtualization, IBM has been the oldest player,

offering the technology on its servers based on the Power5 processor. But now,

virtualization is going to come down to the desktop level pretty soon, with both

Intel and AMD introducing the technology into their own processors. This will

make virtualization cheaper as well, as more virtualization applications are

developed on these platforms. It will also result in stiffer competition for

existing players, thereby making the technology more affordable.

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor

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