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Virtualization in 200 Whether it is cost savings, or energy efficiency, or eventually moving to the cloud that is leading the increased adoption of virtualization technology, virtualization does definitely live up to the hype By Amit Kumar Srivastava, Product Manager, virtualization services, Data Center Transformation services, HCLISD "An efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine" was the definition given by Popek and Goldberg for a virtual machine. Virtualization has been around for nearly 40 years since the time of the mainframes. IBM, a pioneer in the area of virtualization technology, is now implementing this in the server and market. There has been a surge in academic research on virtualization in an attempt to boost system utilization in heterogeneous environments, and is evolving into an umbrella of technologies, in its various connotations and offshoots such as virtualization, application virtualization, virtualization, virtualization, virtualization, virtualization, virtualization, base virtualization and more. Virtualization is more loosely defined as a method of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments using either hardware or software partitioning along with the application of one or more concepts or technologies such as time-sharing, partial or complete machine simulation, emulation, quality
Virtualization Trends Getting greater efficiency out of an organization s IT infrastructure is the dream of every CIO, and this dream appears to be crystallizing with the advent of innovation in both virtualization and distributed computing technologies. Owing to its success, there is continued adoption of virtualization technologies. Following are a few reasons for the increased attention that virtualization is getting. Virtualization is promising: Virtualization is not new. Virtualization has been introduced to the industry around thirty years ago on IBM mainframes. Virtualization of commoditized x86 servers is new and is promising. Consolidation through server virtualization is the primary driver for over 80 percent of users running virtualization in production, and the 95 percent running it in some form today. Virtualization promises increased utilization of resources, reduced space, reduced TCO and increased ROI of servers thereby improving IT agility and reducing provisioning time. This technology is definitely delivering on its promise. Virtualization is moving to the next level base server virtualization: The type of servers and applications being virtualized were initially Web servers and file and print servers. More than half of all organizations have virtualized these servers. The emphasis over the past few years has been on the virtualization of other types of servers. A recent trend has been the virtualization of base servers. Critics said this could not be done but with improvements in I/O such as vsphere DirectPath and Intel's new I/O improvements for virtualization in the chipset many organizations have in fact virtualized their base servers. Virtualization has gone a step further with the apparent success in the virtualization of Microsoft Exchange servers as well. The inflection point in virtualization has been reached: One would expect or virtualization implementation to be the highest. In recent years server virtualization seems to be steadily on the rise and is said to be substantially higher than virtualization. With the improvements in infrastructure outsourcing and chipset we may hit an inflection point for the level of adoption in virtualization. A shift toward multi-hypervisor environments: Hypervisors were traditionally found only in centers. Hypervisor is also called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). It is essentially a virtualization software enabling multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host machine. Organizations are now adding other hypervisors to their existing mix of virtualization technology. VMware continues to be a dominant player in this market with VMware ESX with Microsoft Hyper-V and Xenserver from Citrix fast catching up. Both Hyper-V and Xenserver have been included free with other products from their respective vendors. This will only contribute to the expansion of multihypervisor environments. Disaster recovery benefitting from virtualization: Virtualization is now percolating into smaller and medium scale organizations. The number of servers in these organizations is lower and hence server consolidation would not make sense. Benefits that would accrue from consolidation such as increased utilization of resources, reduced space, reduced total cost of ownership and increased return on investment of servers would not be a compelling case for virtualization in small and medium organizations. Rather than the mentioned benefits Disaster Recovery seems to be a better case for consolidation for small and medium businesses. Virtualization eliminates the duplicate physical configuration at the disaster recovery site and hence dramatically reduces the cost of disaster recovery through the use of virtual servers. Management is critical to successful expansion: Evaluation and implementation of the right
Market Pressure and Decision Points The industry is scrambling to adopt virtualization for a range of reasons: so that groups of inefficient servers can be replaced with a fewer machines; so software can be tested in harmless partitions; and ultimately, so centers packed with computers can fluidly adjust to shifting priorities. In this scramble it is important to note Increase in Buying Power: The competition between VMware and Microsoft getting stiffer and with Citrix XEN being introduced with enhanced features the options for customers for choosing the Hypervisors will only get better Virtualization-focused security solutions: Ever increasing virtualization leads customers to utilizing trusted modules to attest to embedded hypervisors. Third-party products continue to add security to virtual machines without having to run an agent inside each, which will continue to drive security advances for virtualized environments and hence come up us a new space. Orchestration of virtualization across center: Follow-the-sun virtual machine migration and orchestrated use of secondary and off-premise center for peak loads will be a growing trend in near future. Commitment: Virtualization is no longer considered as a value-add, customers will look forward to put virtualization as a part of Services contract itself. Cloud computing: HCL agrees with the fact that; with IT companies intended to move to cloud, Whether it is cost savings or energy efficiency or eventually moving to the cloud that is leading the increased adoption of virtualization technology, virtualization does definitely live up to the hype. From creation of an intelligent abstraction layer that hid the underlying complexity of hardware and software to become the key to cloud computing virtualization has come a long way. About the author: The author leads the HCL virtualization initiative under center Transformations Practice. He is a Certified VMware presales consultant (VTSP and VSP) and Cisco Certified Network professional (CCNP). His expertise lies in developing transformation solutions for centers. Amit has undertaken numerous infrastructure consulting projects for global customers. His endeavor is to develop HCL s infrastructure optimization framework, which is enabling customers across the globe to reduce their total IT operate cost and to achieve their business objectives.
HCL Offices INDIA A 0-, Sector 3 Noida, UP 20 30, India Phone: +9 20 252 097 USA Suite 260 6, Broadway New York 0006, USA Phone: +22 703 7984 UK 7th Floor, 68 King William Street London EC4N 7DZ United Kingdom Phone: +44 0 207 072 9304 SINGAPORE 8 Shenton Way 6-0 Temasek Tower Singapore 0688 Phone: +65 6273 8288 AUSTRALIA Level 23, Pacific Highway North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia Phone: +6 2 9929 9900 JAPAN 0F, Sumitomo Fudosan Kudanshita Bldg. 3-5, Jimboucho, Kanda, Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 0-005, Japan Phone: +8 3 5226 264 About HCL: HCL is a $5 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two companies listed in India - HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded in 976, HCL is one of India's original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer of modern computing, HCL is a global transformational enterprise today. Its range of offerings includes product engineering, custom & package applications, BPO, IT infrastructure services, IT hardware, systems integration, and distribution of information and communications technology (ICT) products across a wide range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of over 62,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 26 countries including over 500 points of presence in India. HCL has partnerships with several leading Global 000 firms, including leading IT and Technology firms. About HCL ISD: HCL Technologies Infrastructure Service Division (HCL ISD) is the fastest growing line of business of HCL Technologies. An end-toend owner of IT infrastructure through differentiated value proposition Industrialized IT Management. The concept of Industrialization is truly utility-based with cloud computing as one of the of delivering that service. What the customer gets is optimized, flexible, centralized, standardized and business aligned IT. Its key service offerings include: end-user computing, center and mainframe services, integrated operations management service, cross functional services, security and services. For more information, please visit www.hclisd.com or www.hcltech.com