Server Virtualization: The Fastest “Major Infrastructure Transition” Ever

Server virtualization represents a major infrastructure transition on par with past transitions, like the ones from mainframe to mini (e.g. VAX), mini to UNIX, and most recently UNIX to Wintel. (I don't mean the rise of Wintel on the desktop, although that's also an interesting trend, but the emergence of Wintel running critical business apps in high-end corporate data centers.)

At VMworld last month, a customer mentioned that he felt this transition was harder and slower than the earlier ones. I know the customer is always right, but I disagreed completely and I told him so. It seems to me that VMware is moving much more quickly into high-end mission critical environments than either UNIX or Windows did.

By co-incidence, I had been talking with Steve Herrod, VMware's CTO, about this subject just the day before because the two of us gave a talk together at VMworld. He argued that what has allowed this rapid transition is that you don't have to re-write your applications to take advantage of the new model. Insightful. In some ways, the “virtualized data center” model is very different, but in other ways – in terms of the environment visible to the application itself – it is almost identical. Even when application vendors claim that their product won't run under VMware, it often works just fine. I can't think of any example where a UNIX application just accidentally happened to run under Windows even though the vendor said it wouldn't. There is certainly no U2W comparable to the P2V (physical to virtual) tools now available.

In fact, Steve's observation almost made me question whether server virtualization constitutes a “real” transition equivalent to the others. On reflection, I conclude that it does. Like the others, this transition is driving major changes in how people build and manage data centers, and it enables radically different business models at much lower price points. Also, it really isn't fair to think of server virtualization as being the whole trend. I mean, it is certainly at the center, but when you consider “cloud computing” or the “dynamic data center” – whatever you want to call this new shared infrastructure architecture that's emerging – there is much more going on than just Xen or HyperV or VMware. (We certainly think that storage has a critical role to play. See here and here.)

I think the primary motivation for people to change so quickly is the dismal economy, but Steve is absolutely right that the ability to easily migrate existing apps is what enables this to be the fastest major infrastructure transition ever.

Comments

[Tank]

UNIX to Wintel.... Novell to Wintel

[Suzanne Beecham]

We here at Tek-Tools Software, have experienced first-hand the demand for Server Virtualization. A growing number of our customers are making a transition from physical to virtual environment. While server virtualization is a cost effective and flexible solution for data centers, it increases management complexity. That’s where our flagship product The Profiler suite comes into picture. It provides monitoring and reporting for both physical and virtual environments including VMware and NetApp, as well as other storage devices, servers ,backups, applications, network etc and in spite of the recession we have seen 50% growth in revenue over last year.
For more information please visit: http://www.tek-tools.com