This document describes enterprise virtualization today and the anticipated uses of this technology, particularly leveraging the capabilities provided by widespread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) as a single, converged network fabric.
Virtualization 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Datacenter Netw orks October 2008 Adapted from The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation by John Humphreys, IDC # 211938 Sponsored by BLADE Network Technologies Inc. Server virtualization is now widely accepted as a key method to consolidate computing resources. As companies take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization, they will begin to migrate to what IDC calls Virtualization 2.0 — using virtualization technology to improve business operations and mobility. This document describes enterprise virtualization today and the anticipated uses of this technology, particularly leveraging the capabilities provided by widespread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) as a single, converged network fabric. In addition, challenges for organizations adopting the next generation of virtualization are discussed as is how network virtualization — another form of virtualization — can help meet these challenges. This paper also looks at the role BLADE Network Technologies has in next-generation datacenters with Virtualization 2.0 technologies.
Virtualization Today Server virtualization now is a mainstream technology. Recent IDC surveys found that over 50% of all customers are employing server virtualization for production applications, including mission-critical applications such as supply chain management and enterprise resource planning. Within the next 12 months, these same users expect nearly half of their applications will be hosted on a virtualized server.
Server virtualization has enabled enterprises to harness the growing power of inexpensive computers and put a higher percentage of purchased capacity to use. An added benefit of virtualization is that organizations are also saving in terms of footprint and power and cooling costs within the datacenter. And server virtualization can also extend the life of datacenters.
This first phase of virtualization — which is primarily deployed for server consolidation — is dramatically changing the economics of IT, simply by addressing capital costs. This phenomenon has influenced the adoption of other IT-changing technologies. IDC sees the rapid adoption of blade servers, for example, as proof. Organizations are combining blades in a chassis, then running virtualization software on top of those blades, consolidating and encapsulating multiple applications to drive up system utilization.
IDC 701 The Next Phase: Virtualization 2.0 Initially, server virtualization technology has been used as a means to consolidate servers by encapsulating an operating system and application into an isolated virtual machine (VM) and then running multiple virtual machines on a physical server. For the most part, this technology has been applied to servers only, but more recently, the concept of consolidating desktops via the technology has been gaining momentum. Both of these applications leverage the encapsulation benefits of virtualization, but the technology also offers mobility benefits — the ability to move a virtual machine from location to location — as well. Such mobility occurs via either a cold migration — which simply copies the virtual machine and restarts a copy somewhere else — or a live migration, which moves a live running virtual machine, while maintaining state.
These attributes are kicking off the next phase of adoption, which IDC calls Virtualization 2.0, in which the mobility capabilities of advances in server and desktop virtualization leverage emerging network virtualization technologies and the high-performance, low-latency, and lossless capabilities provided by 10GbE network topologies to enable a host of new use cases such as business continuity, disaster recovery, and high availability.
In light of these new use cases, organizations are beginning to look at how virtualization can help them address the following datacenter issues: ! Reduce IT administrative costs ! Control IT management costs ! Improve productivity even as IT demands grow ! Reduce energy and cooling costs
Virtualization technology will increasingly play a role in corporate mobility and continuity to reduce downtime and increase the agility of IT. For example, enterprises are looking at virtualization as a way to minimize planned downtime and protect IT assets in case of disas... [download for more]
