Betting on Database Virtualization
Friday, October 31, 200809:12 am EDT
I just returned from the annual IBM Information On Demand conference in Las Vegas where I was able to catch up with a number of our partners and customers - i.e. I was not spending time in the casinos! In my meetings with the top two hypervisor vendors, I was told that more and more customers are migrating their databases to virtual machines. This move is one that I and other virtualization watchers have expected as the inevitable act two, following the very successful initial value proposition of system consolidation. So the database virtualization train has left the station right? Well ... sort of.
To temper this news, the support policies of the major database vendors still remain tepid - basically, they’re saying, “We’ll allow customers to run on hypervisors but if they open support tickets and we suspect the hypervisor is part of the problem, the hypervisor has to be ripped out or support will cease.” And from what I hear, those databases moving to VMs are at the small end of the scale, in terms of size and importance. So what gives?
The lustre of virtualization is clearly attractive - dynamic infrastructure, higher utilization, lower costs, and centralized management. But for databases to join the movement in a big way, there has to be a lot more than just live migration and HA.
As it turns out at the conference I was asked to get involved in some of these fledgling opportunities to put databases on VMs. Our GRIDSCALE Database Virtualization solution is a perfect fit to provide dynamic load balancing and continuous availability for these databases across VMs, even across data centers. Since we’ve been doing this for enterprises big and small in physical environments, xkoto provides a natural path to providing the same availability, performance, and agility in VM environments.
I agree with the hypervisor community that database virtualization is the next big thing for virtualizing the data center - maybe next time we won’t need to flip a coin to determine if this trend is meeting its potential.
