Do Your Virtual Machines Eat Pizza?
Know What Virtualization Is, But What Is Next? – Chapter 13
Of course your virtual machines do not each pizza? Well mine do. I know, I am sure, some of you believe that I hang around the cold vaults, sniffing the ozone that comes off transformers, the power supply type, not the robotic type. There a few individuals at VMware, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, etc., who are certain that I have an intellectual challenge due to secret consumption of Halon. In their collective opinions, I have limited brain capacity. It is a fact, I have been told to my face that I am crazy, that my views are embryonic, and that I just don’t know the facts about the state of virtualization in the industry today. All those that have believed me insane, the title of this article may be, again from their collective viewpoints, prove the point, how asinine my perception of virtualization is. Well, so be it. Maybe my professional frustration has, at least, damaged my logical diagnostic aptitude.
But, regardless of reality, perspective, or fact, my virtual machines eat pizza. Or to be explicit, my virtual instances eat resource pizza pie. Of course they do. Disk, Network, Memory IO, and CPU cycles, everyone in virtualization, be it operating system isolation based, application instance based, or something in the middle, we know this, pardon the cliché, these truths to be self-evident, and obvious. The entire rationale for virtualization is better consumption of resources? Over subscription, which I am not a fan of in most cases, if not accurate assumption of resources available. In the context of the title for today? Making sure every slice of pizza is eaten, very bite is enjoyed, that my clients are arguing about the last piece of pizza in the box, no pun indented. Rather than saying… go ahead, you can have the last slice, because if they are saying that? I did not do my homework right, because in virtualization there should never, never, ever, ever, be a virtual instance, cough, client which does not leave the table just a bit hungry. Yes, hungry, everyone has to be just a bit hungry. Why? When that is the case, I have achieved three nines utilization no?
Wait, hold up, and stop, what the heck does leaving the table hungry, pizza, and whatever you are saying have to do with virtualization. Well, it is obvious right? Predictive modeling! What? You did not see that coming? Odd, I would have thought everyone would have? Yes, predictive modeling. If the dirty secret of operating system isolation in virtualization is poor, or even worse, bad code, then the stupidity of virtualization, is the lack of extensive and exhaustive use of predictive modeling. This is not to say that this issue is not understood, it is, at least to some degree by the great minds of technology on some high plane of cognitive insight. Predictive Analytics (PA) is already well established in some areas of endeavor. Everyone of us has gained benefit from PA, every time we surf to a website, and said web site suggests a different but related product? Amazon and Netflix leverage the hell out the concept. The computing industry knows the power of PA, ComputerWorld commented on it in 2006, and CIO commented on the same concept in 2004. So I ask you, why has PA not turned virtualization on its head? We understand how to make pizza, cough, implement virtualization. But we don’t really know how to make virtualization resource utilization better, in a predictive manner? If you know just how many slices of pizza you need to make, you know just how much infrastructure you really need to pre-provision, right? Sorry, I just twisted the metaphoric linear relationship. But I believe you see the point no? True, there have been attempts to address the issue, BMC Software in 2005, and SearchDataCenter scratched the surface in 2007 referencing a few more player in the field of PA application to virtualization. However, I have yet to see PA change virtualization. Why is that? Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and VirtualCenter (VC) to not have PA integrated? True, VC has HA and DRS, which on the QT (Quick Tip) makes recommendations on host-to-virtual-instance alignment could be done but that is historical trending based on existing infrastructure, not PA against pre-provisioning. PA should happen at initial P2V candidacy, as a what-if analysis before an entire virtualization infrastructure is evaluated, not just as virtual instances are introduced to established virtual clusters, hosts and/or sites.
So how to we kick start PA use? By way of example, I realize PA use in virtualization is not trivial. So here is a suggestion. Every hardware manufacturer, to receive inclusion to the any virtualization vendors respective HCL must execute and maintain baseline performance data. This is already done, no? Sales teams nee this or have this to some degree? Just needs to be standardized or normalized across all vendors. Every software publisher should do the same, should take the baseline configuration of the systems via VMmark, Sandrasoft, or whatever tool resource analysis tool was used, and run their application in the same context. No, not every variant, but say high, medium, and low scale host platforms as published by the hardware vendors. So every hardware vendor does three basic models and every software publisher does the three (3) largest hardware vendors, say HP, Dell, IBM. This is where the strategic alliances should make things happen, yes? I do not see nine (9) unit test scenarios for each software publisher as difficult or abusive. Share the data on the web, in a standard format that can then be imported and establish a baseline for PA for virtualization frameworks, like VC and SCVMM no? This datastore would grow, and develop like an open source initiative?
Every single PA integrated tool could mine this data to establish better modeling for virtualization! Aligned Strategy believes there is real money to be made in this scope. Does it not seem like common sense? PA needs a traditional hardware trending model to leverage for virtual instance what-if analysis, right? Is not the greenest thing we can do for ourselves; is figure out just how many slices of pizza our virtual instances need before we order the pizza? Dang it… while I have been trying convince everyone to change the world of virtualization… some rotten so and so snagged the last slice of pepperoni! I wish I could have predicated that… well, that is the point of the article, after all.
Add comment May 14th, 2008
