whether you will need to retrain your
staff to integrate virtualization into
your environment, and then weigh that
against the benefits.
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.
simon 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 lifecycle.
It is the application that IT is
charged with delivering and 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.
tom BishoP: I agree with that. IT
transformation today is really all about
two things: delivering the services that
business cares 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
steve heRRoD
at the end of the
day, virtualization is
a tool. the goals are
to make life better,
and particularly
for smBs, to make
computing simpler.
to make it easy for
smBs is to enable
them to operate
highly available and
securely, and to
solve their business
problems with their
applications.
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.
tom BishoP: All of the issues we have
been discussing are proxies for the
fact that we build applications incor-
rectly. We build applications without
regard to how much they cost to own,
how much they cost to manage, and
their impacts on their operating en-
vironments. As you design your infra-
structure architectures, a conversation
around application life cycle will be
far more productive than a discussion
around virtualization.
mache cReeGeR: So 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
towards common functionality. The
real analysis should be on what management paradigms you choose and, if
you are inclined towards a cloud-based
platform, evaluating whether virtualization can be an asset in achieving the
benefits of that paradigm.
Mache Creeger ( mache@creeger.com) is the principal of
Emergent Technology associates, marketing and business
development consultants.