2010 Prediction: Joe Graves, Stratus Technologies

By Joe Graves
published: Tuesday, January 19 2010

Seeing the forest for the virtual trees: gaining visibility into a virtual infrastructure thicket will be 2010 priority

Smart companies are expanding their use of virtualization as much as possible, to reduce expenses and gain agility. What began with the virtualization of ancillary applications is now being adopted for business critical solutions. As companies seek to leverage virtualization’s well chronicled benefits through higher-value, higher-impact business processes, systems, and operations, exercising control over the virtual infrastructure takes on increased urgency. Figuring out how to do this, together with rationalizing potentially disruptive virtualization management and control with existing enterprise management systems, will be a major focus for virtualization technology users in 2010.

The coming year is going to be tumultuous as users rally to make the most of their virtualization investments, past and future. IT administrators are facing a whole new virtual world of management challenges - keeping control of virtual sprawl, tracking down resource-zapping zombie virtual machines and staying ahead of capacity issues in an environment predicated on dynamism for starters. They’re going to be shopping for answers and they are probably not going to like what they hear from virtualization suppliers about cohesive, comprehensive and streamlined infrastructure management tools available today or in the near future. Market pressure will shepherd this evolution and fill in the missing puzzle pieces, of which there are many.

Users bristle at the thought of being locked in to a single vendor, so only a few vendors have the distinction of dominating a customer’s infrastructure. While VMware may have the commanding virtualization market share at the moment, Microsoft has commanding market presence of its own. It has a base to build on with Hyper-V R2, especially in the mid-market, SMBs, and corporate desktops. The competitive jockeying will be good for the marketplace in terms of cost and options, but not right away; there is still too much posturing going on.

The battling for supremacy among the big virtualization providers has implications in terms of interoperability. Even within their own product lines, interfaces between management tools lack compatibility. Much of the connective tissue will likely come from third-party tool providers, which means users will have to deal with more vendors, not fewer, at least until such time as the big players scoop them up. Moving beyond the initial, basic virtualization benefits found in physical infrastructure consolidation to actively managing workload priorities and setting up chargeback for virtual resource usage by business units, companies will discover more gaps in the vendor landscape.

One thing is for sure: a single vendor will never have all the necessary tools or even the best tools users need to manage their expanding virtual infrastructures.

The need for a variety of management tools from a range of vendors creates its own, new layer of complexity and introduces unknowns with the potential to increase risk. Factor in that more mission-critical applications are concentrated on fewer physical servers, and the importance of bullet-proofing the underlying physical infrastructure becomes clear. Virtualization’s high-availability attributes do little to protect the underlying hosts. Even the best management tools can’t help when hardware fails. Also, there is no reason to assume that hardware that worked prior to virtualization is suitable for this new paradigm. For many companies about to invest in overdue technology refreshes, now is the best time to evaluate platform suitability and explore alternatives better matched to the realities of virtualization.

IT management barely has its arms around virtualization in the data center and already a competing suitor – cloud – is knocking at the door. And in the same way that virtualization technology is forever changing the commodity x86 server industry, growth of cloud services, such as Software-as-a-Service, could be fueled by users seeking relief from virtualization management complexities. Letting somebody else deal with the infrastructure, investments, staffing and all the rest has enormous appeal, leaving the business to concentrate on revenue generation and competitive advantage. It’s more likely, however, that both virtualization and cloud computing will progress together as each reveals what it can do best in any particular situation for a particular set of user needs. Let’s check back on that twelve months from now.