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.
I had the pleasure of being a part of the NGDC Virtualization 2.0 panel moderated by Dan Kusnetzky. Along with my fellow panelists Greg O’Connor (Trigence), Jonah Paransky (StackSafe), Larry Stein (Scalent), we weighed in on questions about the definition, differentiators, drivers, and next steps to take in virtualization.
Right at the start we turned things around and asked the attendees how many of them were running VMs in prod environments - not surprisingly, only 10% raised their hands. Clearly, the benefits of what we called Virtualization 1.0 - server consolidation and the ease of managing multiple configurations in dev/test environments - have a ways to go towards broader adoption.
This “road-not-yet-traveled” formed the foundation of most of the panel’s perspective on the next wave that will comprise Virtualization 2.0, namely that all the core virtues of today’s physical data center need to move into VMs. Values like availability, reliability, scalability, and manageability are quickly being added piece-by-piece, but the ultimate measure of mainstream adoption will be the P2V migration of enterprise applications.
My own response to the final question of what IT professionals should do to get further down the virtualization path is to look at where they are facing current pain points or opportunities for change - like SLA challenges, capacity planning misses, a hardware refresh, application upgrade, or planning for a whole new data center. When the opportunity to open up the architecture arrives, one should take a good look at what virtualization has to offer, not just at the server, but all the way up and down the stack, from network to storage to databases to applications to desktops.
