Why Virtualization Matters

By David Marshall
published: Wednesday, January 24 2007

Virtualization, what is it? And why do I need it?

Virtualization is one of those buzzwords that is being freely floated around the industry left and right, and can mean so many different things to so many different people. Lately, virtualization has been getting a lot of press coverage, and industry analysts are telling business organizations that this is a “must have” technology. It’s even been said that if you haven’t already at least started to look at how virtualization can be used within your company, you’re probably already falling behind.

So, what exactly is virtualization? In the context of this discussion and to put it in the most simplistic terms, virtualization technology is a way of making a physical computer function as if it were two or more computers or even a totally different computer altogether. Obviously, as stated, this is a very simple explanation of a complex term and is coming from a 20,000-foot view of things. However, it’s enough to get you started down that road of thinking.

Staying within that context and dropping a few thousand feet, virtualization should be thought of as an abstraction layer that separates the physical hardware from a single operating system. It allows a single physical machine to run multiple virtual machines with heterogeneous operating systems, side-by-side in isolation. These virtual machines can then be allowed to either interoperate or they can be totally unaware of each other. Each virtual machine operates with their own set of virtual hardware (Processor, Memory, Network Adapter, Hard Drive, etc.) and is then loaded with its own operating system and applications. The virtual machine’s operating system (or guest operating system) sees a consistent or normalized set of hardware regardless of the underlying physical hardware.

From a business perspective, there are many ways in which your organization can benefit from using virtualization.

• Maximize resources – Perhaps the most common problem being solved with virtualization today - applications are running on their own dedicated servers, which results in low server utilization rates across the server environment. Server consolidation is used to help maximize the compute capacity on each physical server which therefore increases ROI on existing and future server expenditures.
• Test and development optimization - Test and development servers can be rapidly provisioned by using pre-configured virtual machines. By leveraging virtualization, development scenarios can be standardized and quickly executed upon in a repeatable fashion. It also allows for increased collaboration, and ultimately helps with delivering a product to market faster and with less bugs.
• Quickly respond to business needs – Deployment processes are becoming more difficult to manage in a complex environment and IT is unable to adapt as quickly to changing business requirements. Moving to a virtual environment helps with procurement, setup and delivery, giving IT the efficiency needed for rapid deployment.
• Reduce business continuity costs – Virtualization encapsulation (creating an entire system into a single file) and abstraction (removing away the underlying physical hardware) help to reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity by offering high availability and disaster recovery solutions where a virtual machine can easily be replicated and moved to any target server.
• Solve security concerns - In an environment where systems are required to be isolated from each other through complex networking or firewalls, these systems can now reside on the same physical server and yet remain in their own sandbox environment, isolated from each other using simple virtualization configurations.

Virtualization can address these and other issues to help organizations reach operational efficiency and data center agility. Virtualization should be thought of as an enabling technology that can help IT organizations deploy creative solutions to help solve business challenges.

Are people really using this technology or is it just more media hype?

Virtualization does have a number of challenges to overcome. In fact, in order to get where it is today, one of the biggest hurdles that it had to clear was the notion that it wasn’t a data center, production-ready technology. Once it got beyond the reputation of simply being “cool” and finally achieving its “must have” status, the technology has continued to gain strong momentum. It also gained momentum as it moved beyond just being thought of as a server consolidation tool. In a study based on 150 interviews with early adopters, Andi Mann, an IT consultant with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), identified that disaster recovery and business continuity were the number one drivers of virtualization. As companies continue to move beyond a single use-case scenario for server virtualization, the excitement around virtualization will only continue to get stronger.

However, like any new technology, when something first gets introduced, naysayers are usually the first on the scene and reporting things louder than most. However, it seems like virtualization was dealt a pretty straightforward and fair hand. Most of the problems, questions or concerns that have been raised by consumers have been completely legitimate.

• Windows shops feared installation and operation of VMware ESX Server – With its Linux like interface, at first glance the product didn’t seem to fit within the “normal” Windows application parameters and probably seemed too confusing.
• Linux shops may not have adopted VMware ESX Server quickly because it was a commercial package – Linux operators are more prone to accept open-source software.
• Lack of training and expertise – To become an early adopter of virtualization basically meant that you had the time and patience to teach yourself the product. There were no training courses or books on the subject. Therefore, with a lack of experts in the field from which to hire, organizations weren’t quick to adopt and implement a technology that it didn’t have an employee pool to pull from.
• Management cost – While virtualization certainly seemed capable of solving capital expenditure (CAPEX) issues, there seemed to be a gaping hole in operating expenditures (OPEX). Managing a physical and virtual data farm became a complex task without the proper tools being made available.
• Technical support issues – There have been instances where trying to solve a problem with an application running inside of a virtual machine with a vendor’s technical support group has been challenging. Support specialists may insist that the problem be reproduced on a real server environment to ensure that virtualization isn’t the root cause.

Once the industry started to identify and correct these and other concerns, adoption and proliferation seemed evident.

Ok, so the buzz about virtualization isn’t just marketing fluff or media hype. And even though the term “virtualization” seemed to be going around the IT world like an epidemic, widespread buzz about a product doesn’t always mean that there’s something there. But since that doesn’t seem to be the case with this technology, the next question becomes - are people actually using it? Reports coming from analyst firms such as the Yankee Group, IDC and Gartner seem to signify that the answer is a resounding “yes”.

On July 2006, US analyst firm, the Yankee Group, released its server virtualization findings after polling 1,700 managers and executives worldwide, revealing that three out of four businesses, regardless of size, either have or plan to deploy server virtualization over the next 12 months. Only 4% of respondents, ranging from the smallest SMBs to the largest multi-national enterprises, said they had no plans to install a virtualization solution.

Those businesses that were able to quantify the TCO achieved after installing server virtualization technology offered the following information: 10% said they cut TCO costs by somewhere between 10 and 20%; 13% indicated they shaved their TCO costs by 20 to 30%; another 17% said their TCO costs declined by 30 to 75%, while 8% estimated they had achieved cost savings ranging from nearly 50% to over 75%. Clearly, there are organizations that are reaping the benefits of server virtualization.

Analyst firm IDC announced in October 2006, the worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to $560 million in 2005, a robust 67% growth over the previous year and topping the 63% year-over-year growth recorded in 2004. John Humphreys, research director for IDC’s Enterprise Computing Group, predicts that an already strong virtualization software market will expand to more than $1.8 billion in 2009. The market is currently around $810 million, which is up 46% from the $560 million in 2005.

Humphreys said, “The growth in the dynamic VMS market will continue as organizations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware.” He continues, “While we believe VMS is a foundational technology to the creation of dynamic IT environments, the challenge going forward is to get users to integrate virtualization with legacy management tools and enhance management functionality to solve specific business issues.”

In a recent report issued by analyst firm Gartner, their study showed that the emergence of virtualization - and its ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single server – has slowed the demand for servers. Jeffrey Hewitt, a research director at Gartner, said that while the reported numbers were a good sign for the server marketplace, the results could have been much higher if not for the effect of virtualization.