Grid Meter » We Virtualized Our Servers ... Now We Have to Manage Them?

September 06, 2005 | Comments: (0)

We Virtualized Our Servers ... Now We Have to Manage Them?

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IDC has reported a whopping 62% growth in virtual machine software over the last year, according to this Network World article. The focus of the article is the intense amount of virtualization management solutions being released by the systems management vendors -- and how these vendors are going about the actual management of the virtual servers themselves.

The irony, of course, is that while virtualization has been so heavily hyped as a way of simplifying server provisioning and management -- virtual machines themselves are a resource, and yield a new type of complexity that in and of itself must be managed.

During a virtualization talk at LinuxWorld New York back in May, Rich Green (of Cassatt) said "virtualization is a means rather than an end that can be used to address a growing set of issues in the IT Industry. So rather than looking at virtualization as a stand-alone phenomena, the industry should consider it as a tool or technique to create the necessary abstractions to release applications and services from the details of systems, networks and storage."

I've been receiving an increasing number of questions from folks about the connection between virtualization and Grid computing. Similar to what Green said, while virtualization uses some neat tricks that create separation between applications and underlying resources -- the Grid community is addressing the broader set of technical challenges associated with coordinated resource sharing between virtual organizations.

Virtual machines started out on single boxes (SMPs and mainframes). Today organizations are managing clusters of (usually running on similar types of boxes) virtual machines. As we move towards connecting these clusters of virtual machines together, a whole new range of problems (large scale data replication, network provisioning issues, security issues) come into the picture ... and these are the distributed computing challenges that Grid is uniquely equipped to address.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 6, 2005 12:19 PM

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