CTO Roundtable
VIRTUALIZATION

Certainly think about what you’re running in your environment. If you’re running Windows, think about using Hyper-V and some sort of high-level management construct that doesn’t require you to do a large integration effort. CROSBY Virtualization is a feature set, not an objective. It’s a technology that we should look at in the same way as compilers or TCP/IP stacks. It’s a passing fad. The real benefits will come out of the overall ability to compose and manage an application throughout its life cycle.

It is the application that IT is charged with delivering, not virtual machines. The sooner we move the debate from virtual machines back to delivering services to end users, the faster people will focus on the tools that will drive them through that application-life-cycle process. BISHOP I agree with that. IT transformation today is really all about two things: delivering the services that businesses care about and doing it as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Virtualization has a role to play in both of those, but it’s just an enabler; it’s not part of the higher-level set of objectives. The challenge is how to fold in the capabilities that virtualization provides into a higher-level set of mechanisms to enable you to achieve those two objectives. The harder challenge is changing the focus of what IT does and the people who do the work. A large number of IT people still view recovering the database as their job, not delivering business services. GUSTAV My definition of good engineering is ease of removal, not ease of implementation. One of the common characteristics of the available VM platforms is that transitions between them are relatively easy. Physical-to-virtual migrations don’t actually depend on you being the physical part for them to work. If you were to look today at a physical-to-virtual migration of something that already happens to be in Veridian or VMware or Xen, it’s going to work.

Since most of these platforms have quite sophisticated physical-to-virtual movements, worry less about whether you are tying yourself to something that you will be stuck with for many years, and worry more about the types of benefits you will gain from its use.

BISHOP All of the issues we have been discussing are proxies for the fact that we build applications incorrectly. We build applications without regard to how much they cost to own, how much they cost to manage, and their impacts on their operating environments. As you design your infrastructure architectures, a conversation around application life cycle will be far more productive than a discussion around virtualization.

CREEGER What you’re all telling me is something I learned in the AI (artificial intelligence) business in the early 1980s. AI was considered to be a market, even though I spent a great deal of time telling folks it was just a technology like compilers and file systems. Virtualization is replaying that old script today with the help of a strong media amplifier. Ultimately, just like AI, virtualization will get subsumed into the toolbox of best IT practices.

Folks need to avoid that hype and have confidence that regardless of vendor choice, all the VM platforms will get you where you need to go. They should focus on the services they need to deliver and work backward to the tools and technologies that best match their needs. They should believe that sensible people in the technical management of all these companies are working toward standards that will allow as much interoperation as is practical and that it will progress over time. As people better understand where virtualization fits as a component in an IT architecture, all the products will evolve toward common functionality. The real analysis should be on what management paradigms you choose and, if you are inclined toward a cloud-based platform, evaluating whether virtualization can be an asset in achieving the benefits of that paradigm. Q

LOVE IT, HATE IT? LET US KNOW

[e-mail]

© 2009 ACM 1542-7730 /09/0200 $5.00

This article appears in print in the December 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM.