ToutVirtual Enterprise Virtualization - A Proper Virtual World

No More Low Hanging Fruit, Really?

October 17th, 2007

A Strategy for Controlling Non-Virtualization Candidate Selection
Virtualization, Fine, Well Sort Of? - Chapter 04

There are three philosophical conflicts within the virtualization community, one you are already familiar of when I was rather comical, in my view, with how virtualization is addictive to management. This article will now discuss the two counter measures to this addiction of declaring anything and everything a candidate for virtualization.

The first counter measure, is to establish virtual instances for everything based on factual data which is not a bad thing in concept, however, this is expensive in that every questionable virtual instance must be validated via empirical results. This type of proof of concept oriented candidate solution is like stepping into the mud, before you look to see if there is mud to step in. Developers and clients alike actually hate this methodology. Forcing developers to develop on virtual instances, the clients to certify on virtual instances, and only then going to production on virtual instances is safe, sound, and consistent, but it makes everyone follow the rules all the time. Yikes! By chance or fate if the number of virtualized instances that have to be backed-out to traditional hardware is small then maybe this strategy works. Another significant factor that really hurts this back out scenario is when physical-to-virtual (P2V) efforts are done to retire very old hardware, so backing out from virtualization can mean purchasing new hardware. Ouch!

The second counter measure, which is difficult to communicate to management, is to drive co-hosting, or container oriented concepts in parallel to typical hypervisor based virtualization. Now, now, those that are thinking, wait containers are virtualization, yes, but containers are really in between hypervisor virtualization and true co-hosting of application frameworks. For example, Citrix is a variant container model that promotes heterogeneous application co-hosting. Enlightened use of Citrix can achieve some very interesting and significant results. However, moving beyond far beyond Citrix, and of course even Microsoft System Resource Manager, which is at this point is a feature weak container framework, re-evaluate the true power of Microsoft SQL server, Oracle, and Microsoft IIS. Yes there are others, but I use these few as examples only. These applications are true frameworks, which support instances! Using application frameworks effectively, you can far out perform hypervisor based virtualization. Wow! True this methodology requires a very experienced engineering and operational teams, in truth, skilled integrators. Of course, co-hosting capable application frameworks do have a dark side, which they share with their operating system based container heritage siblings, one bad operating system or application framework wide issue, an update or patch gone wrong, can be catastrophic. This is the one risk that hypervisor models avoid of course since the operating system and any encapsulated application framework in such an instance could survive with scaled cautious deployment of updates.

So how does this discussion apply to the title? It should jump at you! The true strategy for non-virtualization is to be very good at virtualization candidate selection and implementation. Bad candidates for virtualization of any type, hypervisor or container oriented, are obvious, beyond hardware disqualification, performance disqualification against existing empirical data, management has a very hard time yelling about objective results, doing so is a waste of time, thus a waste of money. Chah-ching!

Entry Filed under: A Proper Virtual World