The Virtual Edge

Unbundling the complexity of IT resources is the goal of every CIO. While a
plethora of IT apps drive the processes, it is the hardware backbone that powers
these apps. As enterprises kept adding new apps, their serversthe key apps
enableralso got added up. But recently, many enterprises are struggling to
manage their server infrastructures, due to their heterogeneous and distributed
nature.

With multiple configurations, the homogenous distribution of the hardware
resources and applications has become a big challenge. It is in this backdrop
that virtualization is gaining momentum. Server virtualization is nothing but
hiding the complexity by masking of server resources across operating systems,
physical servers, and computing resources like processors into multiple virtual
machines.

Says Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, India and Saarc, Vmware,
Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer,
from IT professionals and Mac enthusiasts to commercial businesses and
government organizations. There are millions of people around the world today
who use virtualization to save time, money, and energy while achieving more with
the computer hardware they already own. Moreover, one can use software to
virtualize hardware resources of an x86-based computer, including CPU, RAM, hard
disk, and network controller, to create a fully functional virtual machine that
can run its own operating system and applications just like a real computer,
adds Mahabala.

Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with
each other, so that one can safely run several operating systems and
applications at the same time on a single computer.

Ground Realities

Experts say that virtualization has passed the hype curve and is in the
adoption stage across the world. According to IDC, virtualization will become
mainstream during 2008 because of its defined benefits and will see a
large-scale adoption.

In the Indian context, enterprises cutting across segments like IT/ITeS and
manufacturing have been the early adopters of virtualization. Moreover, IDC
India estimates the share of virtualized servers to double from the present 22%
to 45% by the end of 2008.

In addition to benefits like ease of management and better resource
utilization, enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of additional benefits
like design densities, power and cooling. Riding on the success of server
virtualization, storage virtualization is also coming of age in India.

Eventually, the technology faded away since it was not able to provide more
virtual resources than there are physical ones. Reflecting on the evolution of
virtualization technologies, Subram Natarajan, solutions architect, Systems and
Technology Group, IBM Asia Pacific, says: Hypervisor technology was effectively
able to timeshare the physical resources. It came to be accepted and adopted
widely. Its latent potential indicates that it will be the dominant approach to
virtualization in the industry. Some of the best implementations of this
virtualization technology provide the benefits of superior performance,
efficiency, and scalability.

Says Karthik Ramarao, director, Technology Team, Systems Practice, Sun
Microsystems India; Virtualization is quickly becoming an important technology
across all parts of the IT environment in India. The technology is rapidly being
deployed in server, storage, networking, and client environments. By far the
most visible adoption of virtualization technology is happening in servers, from
the largest UNIX server down to the smallest volume system.

Experts say that server virtualization also infuses agility into data centers
so that it may quickly adapt itself in order to provide necessary IT
infrastructure for supporting a business decision. The key to these benefits is
that virtualization encapsulates the software stack and decouples it from the
underlying hardware. This means customers get both consolidation and mobility
benefits that can be used to address some of the largest challenges facing CIOs
today.

Says Aman Dokania, director and general manager, Infrastructure Software
Business Unit, HP Asia Pacific and Japan: Virtualization makes a lot of sense
in managing the growing IT resources. It makes for easier management and enables
enterprises to create an agile IT infrastructure.

Why Virtualization?

Experts say that the rapid growth, rising costs, low resource utilization,
and unpredictable spikes in workloads are keeping IT managers on their toes.
Companies need to be able to quickly deploy new services and applications but
can no longer afford the high costs of energy, real estate, and complexity
associated with server sprawl. Seeking increased business agility, enterprises
are looking at virtualization technologies to get more out of their computing
resources.

Says Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travels, With the use of the server
virtualization technology, significant cost efficiency can be achieved by
reducing the number of servers considerably. This is gaining momentum in Indian
organizations as businesses are looking at TCO more closely. Fragmented servers
should be viewed as increase in cost of hardware, licenses, manageability,
hosting and related costs. We normally overlook one fact that most servers are
not fully utilized and we keep adding more.

Agrees IBMs Subram Natarajan: Server virtualization will continue to
improve the performance, efficiency, and RAS levels of the hardware. Because of
its robustness, customers will deploy micro partitioning (capability to create
partitions at sub 1 CPU level). The future will focus more on transcending some
of the benefits that we see at the hardware level to application level.

The Road to Virtualization

Experts say that a successful approach toward implementing virtualization
lies in proper planning. Vendors provide various tools that can help streamline
the planning and deployment of the virtual computing environment. Once the
business case for virtualization has been established, a detailed solution
should be developed which takes the applications and resource requirements into
consideration. Solution planning can help ensure that all server equipment meet
or exceed the operational requirements of the solution.

Apart from physical planning, a proper layout of workload deployment needs to
be developed. This workload planning exercise should take into consideration
application-wise capacity, performance, and availability requirements for
servers and its logical partitions. Once all these details are available,
implementation will just be a matter of sequencing the application rollout based
on criticality defined by the company.

Virtualization can be implemented by a variety of ways. The decision is a
function of what level of virtualization is needed, cost to acquire and
implement as well as the flexibility that the solution offers. Says Karthik
Ramarao: On servers, for example, virtualization can be achieved at a hardware
level by what is popularly known as domaining. Here a server system may provide
the flexibility of virtualization along with features of electrical isolation
such as hardware faults or hardware changes that cause minimal disruption while
providing maximum flexibility.

One abstraction of software virtualization is OS virtualization, also called
containers or zones. It provides the ability to create several independent OS
instances or user space instances giving the feel of a completely independent
server from a user perspective. This form of virtualization is very light and
imposes very little or nil penalty on the system unlike many of the hypervisor-based
virtualization, says Ramarao.

Says Mahabala: Our approach to virtualization inserts a thin layer of
software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This
software layer creates virtual machines and contains a virtual machine monitor
that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple
operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without
even knowing it.

Vendors in the Fray

Many companies have turned to virtualization technologies for their servers
and in their data centers to simplify administration and reduce management
chores and operating costs while maintaining reliability, and safeguarding
against disasters. Seeing the significant benefits virtualization delivers in
those environments, companies are now looking to apply the same technology to
their desktop computers.

Talking about virtualization, one company that has built an enviable
reputation is VMware. VMware Server is an ideal starting point for users to
experience the benefits of virtualization.

The VMware infrastructure allows the entire industry-standard infrastructure
farms to be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different
business units or projects. It also provides comprehensive virtualization,
management, resource optimization, application availability, and operational
automation capabilities in an integrated offering. Today, an increasing number
of organizations have global aspirations. At the same time, they know they have
to be nimble to garner competitive advantage, classic case being the growing
organizations in India, says Mahabala.

In terms of new developments, server major HP recently showcased the
industrys first software to analyze and optimize physical and virtual resources
in the same way, bringing the benefits of virtualization to physical servers. HP
estimates that its software, HP Insight Dynamics VSE, will reduce the cost of
common data center tasks by as much as 40%. The software combines HPs
infrastructure portfolio into a single offering with advanced planning and
management for both physical and virtual servers.

With breakthrough logical server technology, the software brings the key
benefits of virtual machines to physical HP platforms so that technology
infrastructure can better adapt to business demands. By detaching the logical
identity from the physical server, logical servers are easily provisioned and
freely moved across the infrastructure, independent of whether they are physical
or virtual. Meanwhile, IBM has been focusing on reducing complexity, improved
management capabilities, energy savings benefits, and high availability
functions in a server environment in the virtualization space.

What emerges at the end of the day is that enterprises are virtualizing on
their road to consolidation of IT resources. In the bargain, they are achieving
a high degree of manageability and simplified administration of hardware
resources like servers.

Today, the software options are also increasing with the entry of Microsoft
in this space. Players like Citrix are also aggressive in this space. As a
result, CIOs have multiple options for virtualization, and industry experts say
that many Indian enterprises are on the threshold of adopting server
virtualization in a big way in the days to come.

Srikanth G

srikanthg@cybermedia.co.in