Virtualization: The time has come

The virtualization ember that VMware fanned into a fire is about to explode into a conflagration as major players pour on fuel. Consider these developments:

Microsoft just started giving away Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 and has announced it will provide support under current Virtual Server contracts for Linux guest operating systems. Native virtualization support will be built into Longhorn.

Red Hat is building support for Xen 3.0 into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; SuSE Linux 10.0 comes with a technological preview of Xen 3; and XenSource is readying a packaged version of its virtualization technology called XenEnterprise.

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The virtualization ember that VMware fanned into a fire is about to explode into a conflagration as major players pour on fuel. Consider these developments:

Microsoft just started giving away Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 and has announced it will provide support under current Virtual Server contracts for Linux guest operating systems. Native virtualization support will be built into Longhorn.

Red Hat is building support for Xen 3.0 into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; SuSE Linux 10.0 comes with a technological preview of Xen 3; and XenSource is readying a packaged version of its virtualization technology called XenEnterprise.

AMD and Intel are building virtualization support into processors. Hardware-assisted virtualization, Intel says, will improve performance by making the hardware handle handoffs between the virtualization layer and guest operating systems, and eliminate control conflicts by providing a "higher privilege ring for the virtual machine monitor," among other benefits. Intel Xeon-based systems with the new capabilities are expected to ship in the first half of this year and Itanium 2 in the second half.

Buyers are excited about the prospects, particularly about how virtualization will make it possible to increase server utilization and allow server consolidation. "Virtualization is huge for us," a senior vice president at a large Northeast financial institution says.

His firm is getting 9% to 14% server utilization today, and he expects virtualization will drive that to 60% to 80% in his IBM Unix environment and 50% to 60% on the VMware/Wintel side.

In a keynote address at the recent LinuxWorld conference in Boston, Dell CTO Kevin Kettler said virtualization plays an important role in his company's scalable enterprise vision. He sees customers moving to environments built on one, two and four socket systems (sockets instead of processors because sockets can be multicore). Customers will be able to pay as they grow instead of investing in monolithic systems.

Surprisingly, Kettler predicts the future of virtualization will be driven by desktop opportunities.

He anticipates a need for desktops to be able to support multiple virtual machines dedicated to different tasks. One VM, for example, might support a secure browser that, if it gets infected, can be killed off without hurting anything else, while a second might support a software stack for gaming, a third could be dedicated to media serving, etc.

"These encapsulated environments would in many ways be appliance-like in nature," he said.

Wile that may be a few years off, there is plenty to get excited about in the enterprise.

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