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 Businesses today are under ever-increasing pressure to reduce operational costs while still ensuring that flexibility, service delivery levels, and business efficiency continue to improve. IT organizations everywhere are being asked to do more with less, thus facing more limits in the space, power, and cooling capacities of their datacenters.
Legacy, silo-architected applications have contributed to server sprawl because each server is sized for maximum workload requirements of a single application — and resources generally cannot be shared. The result is a large number of aging, energy-inefficient servers that run with low utilization levels most of the time.
Virtualization: More than Machines
Virtualization is a key technology that addresses these issues. It helps consolidate legacy applications from multiple obsolete hardware platforms onto a smaller number of up-to-date, more powerful, more energy-efficient servers. Virtualization thus is quickly becoming an important technology across all parts of the IT environment.
Virtualization is rapidly being deployed in server, storage, networking, as well as client environments. It is being used as a tool for consolidation, a means to reduce space and power requirements, and, more recently, as a way to bring business continuity to a larger part of an organization's IT infrastructure.
Virtualization is winning a lot of converts among datacenter administrators because of its ability to help consolidate IT infrastructure, improve manageability, and save valuable resources. Yet in a sense, virtualization has become a victim of its own success. Due to the market share victories of certain vendors, virtual machines have become almost synonymous with virtualization in the public consciousness. But, in reality, virtual machines represent a relatively small chapter in the entire virtualization story.
Get the Whole Virtualization Story
In basic terms, virtualization is about abstracting IT resources from underlying hardware. Often times, the impetus for a virtualization project is that it allows hardware to be treated as a shared resource — with a single interface that promotes centralized management. In the server virtualization arena, virtual machines have recently garnered significant attention.
"Virtualization is winning a lot of converts among datacenter administrators because of its ability to help consolidate IT infrastructure, improve manageability, and save valuable resources."
Virtual machines are not an ideal fit in every environment. In many cases, operating system virtualization better delivers on virtualization's promises of easier management, improved agility, and reduced costs. Therefore, it is important to know which virtualization technologies best address which parts of the datacenter.
Virtual machines permit multiple operating systems — as well as multiple operating systems versions — to run next to each other on the same physical server. This makes virtual machines an ideal product for heterogeneous operating system environments, where different applications require multiple operating system types and versions.
However, the software in the virtual machine that does the translation is expensive form a processing standpoint, especially in high I/O deployments. In fact, as enterprises add more virtual machines to a single server, the system overhead for running a virtual machine environment can quickly exceed 40 percent of the total available processing power. If a particular application demands a lot of network or disk activity, virtual machines do not represent a good fit. But if the application has only modest network and disk requirements, virtual machines can be an ideal solution.
Benefits of Operating System and Storage Virtualization
As an alternative to virtual machines, operating system virtualization occurs within a single operating system instance. By divvying up resources higher up the IT stack, operating system virtualization allows different application environments to share a single operating system kernel. The benefits of OS virtualization include significantly less translation, essentially zero performance penalty, and reduced complexity because there is only a single operating system image to roll out and maintain. Enterprises today can mix virtualization strategies and select the right one for their environment.
Much as in the systems world, storage virtualization has recently emerged as a way to address the availability, cost, and complexity challenges raised by today's storage environments. Tiered storage strategies like information lifecycle management (ILM) have arisen to help balance cost and data availability by moving less frequently accessed data to less expensive media according to predetermined policies. While effective from a cost perspective, ILM strategies often contribute to complexity by encouraging a proliferation of devices and device types.
These challenges make storage virtualization a compelling concept because it can provide a single storage image and a direct interface to all tiers of storage resources operating in the background. Storage virtualization delivers several compelling benefits to IT and business. It helps make the storage environment less complex by offering single pane management. It heightens the value of storage investments by promoting consolidation and greater utilization rates because the underlying storage is more effectively shared among applications. And it delivers improved data protection.
As part of a storage virtualization strategy, a virtual tape library can reduce the complexity of the back-up environment. This approach creates a separate software layer between the host and the archive infrastructure to facilitate a seamless migration to tape without additional resources to manage the back-up process.
Sun Offers Multiple Virutalization Options
Sun recognizes that no two enterprises are alike. Every enterprise has unique needs, application workloads, and data availability and access requirements. That's why Sun offers and supports a complete portfolio of server and storage virtualization software and hardware products. Sun Professional services can help assess, deploy and implement the right mix of technologies and processes for any environment. In other words, Sun is committed to thinking beyond today's all too prevalent one-size-fits-all virtualization mentality.
Anil Valluri
Vice President & Managing Director
India GEM
Sun Microsystems
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