John Humphreys: Virtualization across the Data Center

John Humphrey's, Program VP, IDC's Enterprise Platform Group, discussed virtualization with ITO in, 'Virtualization Across the Enterprise Server Virtualization has a long history starting in mainframes in the 1960's'

Today, no matter whose numbers you reference, virtualization is the hot new technology and is expected to grow extremely rapidly over the next few years. For the most part, virtualization on x86 is based on software which can partition physical servers into one or more 'logical servers' or 'virtual machines'. Virtualization is quickly becoming a critical technology across all parts of the IT environment. The technology is rapidly being incorporation in storage, networks, and client environments. The most visible adoption of virtualization technology is in servers.

Essentially, virtualization software breaks the link between a given software-driven application or service and the hardware resources of the underlying system. In terms of cost benefits, virtualizations impacts both capital and operational costs. Virtualization is a means to increase utilization by consolidating multiple applications on a single host so that capital costs are used efficiently.

From an operational perspective, virtualization impacts costs in a few ways. By separating the application from the underlying hardware, IT administrators are able to more easily manage, provision, restart, and migrate applications on a shared pool of server hardware.

Because of the benefits of virtualization, including costs, flexibility, easy of managing applications, users are also developing a broad set of usage scenarios for virtualization technologies in their environments. These include:

• Consolidation
• Hosting legacy application
• Hardware migrations and upgrades
• Business continuity
• Capacity planning
• Resource management