It's the double edge of virtualization: Hardware and software efficiency comes at the system administrator's expense. But IT departments are getting better at managing it all, thanks in part to some new tools.
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Virtualizing most apps is too risky now, Schwab says | |
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What went wrong? The software wouldn't load on client machines unless someone with administrative privileges reset PCs to accept them. DeFelice learned the hard way that extending virtualization to more users and applications adds a layer of management complexity.
Tools to help deal with that complexity include Symantec's Live Migration and Altiris' Wise Package Studio. Trigence, a startup, has just rolled out software that watches an application as it runs and figures out dependencies, including any left behind when an application moves to a different version of an operating system at its new virtual machine host. Operating system virtualizers move the operating system and its application together to another server, duplicating the exact same version of the operating system. If you want to upgrade the operating system, Trigence-style application virtualization is better. It helps by searching the operating system files at the new host and discovering missing pieces.
Seventy-nine percent of companies with 500 employees or more have adopted server virtualization or will within a year, according to a survey of data center managers by Sage Research. Intel and Virtual Iron last week laid out the economics of virtualization in a Webcast, making the case that virtual servers are a way to contain the escalating electricity costs associated with expanding data centers. Virtual Iron last month demonstrated an advanced management platform, Virtual Manager, which allows for automated management of a variety of virtual machines based on predetermined policies.
Tear Down, Set Up
As service-oriented architectures break up applications into thousands of services, virtualization plays a role by putting them in digital packages and telling a virtual machine what it is the applications need. Applications as virtualized services will be easier to set up, tear down, scale up, or relocate to more powerful servers as traffic mounts, a chief requirement of services on the Web.
| Virtualization Styles Virtualization isn't just for operating systems. Users can virtualize applications and create containers of virtual operating systems. |
Operating system | Application | Containerization |
Operating system virtualization takes a particular instance of the operating system, packages it as a set of digital files, and assigns it limited machine resources, such as memory and CPU cycles. Each virtual machine has its own copy of the system. |
Application virtualization takes a particular instance of an application; understands the software drivers, files, and data it needs; packages them as a set of digital files; and notifies the prospective host system of those needs. |
Both Linux with VServer and Unix in the form of Sun's Solaris 10 can run multiple virtual machines using just one copy of the operating system. This approach reduces complexity without giving up the separation and data security of virtual machines. |
EMC's VMware division has upgraded two products, the Virtual Machine Importer and the P2V Assistant, which moves software running on physical machines to virtual machines, and combined them into VMware Converter 3. VMware also is automating the upgrade of its hypervisor system, ESX Server, so that users of an application running in an ESX Server 2.0 virtual machine won't notice more than a brief pause as the application gets upgraded to the present release, ESX Server 3.0.1. A high-performance form of virtualization, a hypervisor is a kernel operating system, communicating directly with the hardware and bypassing regular operating systems to handle application needs.
