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

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