Should Everything Be Virtualized?

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• Excellent advice Greg.

  While server consolidation is often what first attracts a prospect, often times it is the flexibility and agility to be derived from virtualizing that changes a prospect into a customer.

• I would submit that yes you should indeed virtualize everything that is possible to virtualize. Virtualization gives you something much more valuable than server consolidation or even resource utilization. it buys you the ability to define a lifecycle for a physical server that would be otherwise impactful to your business. Forget Information Lifecycle Management, Think Hardware Lifecycle Management. You as the customer should be careful what you let into your datacenter, but more importantly you should have a plan for how you are going to get it out of your infrastructure without an outage.

  You can use a virtual machine to divorce your hardware from your applications. When a physical server has outlived its usefulness, but the application it hosts is business critical, wouldn’t it be nice to more that application to a current physical server platform? In fact, you can change all kinds of infrastructure beneath a Virtual Machine without affecting the virtual machine.

  What’s the big argument against this virtualize everything argument? It is that a virtual instance won’t be fast enough to take on the load, and that your application needs every possible GB or RAM or GHz of Processor power it can grab onto. If that is the case, then I am also assuming that your are willing to bring your application down every 6 months to upgrade to a newer cutting edge server? By using a Virtual machine, you could in fact do just that. Buy a cutting edge server, virtualize it, and place your application on it in a one-VM to one-Host ratio. When a newer faster machine comes out, migration your application onto that new hardware and redeploy that 1-step-back from cutting edge server for other needs in your environment. You already know that an application in your environment will likely have a lifespan that is twice as long as a common server lifespan. Stop running obsolete servers, they waste power.

  Virtualization gives you the flexibility to infrastructure of your own, except with Virtual Machines you can be the master of your own destiny. I can’t tell you what the most cost effective protocol (iSCSI over CEE, FCoE, FC8Gb) will be in 1 year or in 18 months. Protect your ability to adopt the most cost effective next generation hardware when it becomes cost effective without having to use the word forklift or green-field.

• Thanks for the comments and perspectives Chris and CJ.

  If this post resonates, check out some of the others on this site as there are some recurring themes, would enjoy hearing your comments on some of those as well.

  As the industry becomes more aware of the other benefits of virtualization in the next wave which is “life beyond consolidation”, the opportunities are even greater than those currently being seen. The first wave of desktop, server, storage and other forms of consolidation are a straightforward low hanging fruit conversation and value proposition.

  It’s a different paradigm and way of thinking, in that efficiency can be more than boosting utilization or consolidation. Boosting efficiency is also about managing IT resources (server, storage, I/O networking along with software) more effectively boosting productivity, however without compromising on performance or availability. In other words, enabling an efficient, productive, cost effective green and virtual data center.

  Cheers gs

• Great assessment and advice! But, no, we shouldn't and can't virtualization everything. It's simply not possible. One word: scalability. Among many benefits and business incentives (for example, live migration is pure jaw-dropping technology), highly compute intensive applications (e.g. scientific) are not suitable for virtualization. At least for the near future, there is a threshold that vertical scalability requirement defeats virtualization advantages. There is always that elephant in the room.

• Thanks Charles for the comment and perspectives.

  To clarify, are you saying that a) not everything should be consolidated, or, b) that not everything should be virtualized in the context of consolidaiton, or, c) even if an applicaiton had a dedicated physical server with a hypervisor however no other virtual machines on that server, they should not be virtualized?

  The reason I bring this up is that I concur there are some applicaitons/workloads that should not be consolidated, some that can be virtualized however with their own dedicated server (e.g. virtualization exists for management flexibility), and then there are some that fall into leave as is, or at least for now.

  Cheers gs

• I do see the excellent points for 1-1 virtualization in server space. I meant all a, b & c - such apps are not a good candidate for consolidation to begin with, then the question is whether the virtualization overhead (be it cost, system resources, restrictions, etc.) is worth the management advantages. In a way they aren't isolated from virtualization - outside the box it's virtualized everywhere. So the dynamic and paradigm are certainly changing, however today we still do not have a heterogeneous sysetm virtualization mgmt tool (much like SAN world) and the servers in large data centers are a lot more complex to manage! Finanly, underneath such vertical scalable platform, virtualization does not seem to make capacity and performance management easier. There are more metrics to slice and dice ... although indeed the tools are maturing as we speak ...