Virtualization 2.0
Gartner Data Center Conference 2008
Tuesday, December 02, 200808:09 pm EDT
The MGM Grand in Las Vegas is top-heavy this week with many of Gartner’s top research analysts converging for the annual Data Center Conference. The keynotes and breakouts cover the spectrum from green IT to the cloud. By far the most popular topic is virtualization. In the first presentation server virtualization was predicted to grow to touch up to 50% of all workloads by 2012.
According to Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman, in the past most of these workloads were for dev & test, but now up to 70% of virtualized workloads today are in production environments. In Bittman’s response to the question of whether databases could be virtualized, he noted that the concerns over I/O intensive loads can now be addressed with well-defined data paths, careful application/database design, and adherence to best practices.
From an xkoto perspective, we are seeing more customers moving their databases to VMs. Some of the database best practices that make this transition easier are the same rules that have governed good database design for years, like enforcing referential integrity with primary keys on each table, clustering table and index data together, separating logs from data, making full use of the database engine’s optimizer, and carefully tuning buffer pool sizing.
The steady march of server virtualization is moving from delivering consolidation to agililty to data center management across the stack. It is likely that most workloads including databases will by necessity end up being managed by virtualization technologies.
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GRIDSCALE ON Demand
Thursday, August 21, 200803:24 pm EDT
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Derrick Harris, Editor of On-Demand Enterprise (formerly GRIDToday). We discussed where database virtualization technologies like GRIDSCALE fit into the overall virtualization landscape. We also touched on some important topics such as the impact of continuous availability for SQL Server applications, our partnerships with IBM and Microsoft, and the need for technologies like GRIDSCALE to make cloud computing applications scale.
Read more here.
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Virtualization 2.0: The Road Not Yet Traveled
Monday, August 11, 200808:29 am EDT
In combination with LinuxWorld, the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) event just wrapped up this week in San Francisco. The keynotes were all quite memorable. Being a database guy, I listened intently to Mark Sunday, Oracle’s CIO, as he described the dynamic data center he runs. I managed to fire off a question to him during the open Q&A about whether Oracle would run its most critical databases on Oracle VM given that architects are often concerned about performance with the extra hop through the hypervisor. Mark responded that the performance overhead had been benchmarked and was not a big concern. I think this bodes well for more migrations of big (and small) production databases, Oracle or otherwise, onto VMs. I’d be very interested to hear your opinions on whether production databases will live on VMs in any appreciable numbers....
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