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Kicking virtualization up a notch

By Mark Gibbs, Network World, 02/01/07

Of all of the technology trends that have been important in the world of enterprise IT, there's one that stands out as the 800-pound gorilla - the pink elephant if you will - of the last few years: virtualization.

Virtualization has brought us new ways of doing things from managing desktop operating systems to consolidating servers. What's also interesting is that virtualization has become a conceptual issue - a way to deconstruct fixed and relatively inflexible architectures and reassemble them into dynamic, flexible and scalable infrastructures.

Most of the virtualization systems we use today, such as VMware, Xen, Parallels, VirtualBox and Virtual Iron, apply the technology at the level of individual servers.

(Digression: We just stumbled across an interesting screenshot of VirtualBox running under Vista, which is running under VirtualBox, which is running under Windows XP. Unless they have overclocked some gonzo hardware we're guessing performance is sluggish. Even so, it is very cool in the same way that compiling a compiler using itself is cool.)

To tie lots of individual servers together most of these products have some kind of management console that provides a consolidated view so that virtual machines can be run, monitored, moved and so on. This works well, but it isn't the ultimate model for virtualization for the enterprise.

"What then," you may be wondering, "is the ultimate enterprise virtualization model?" The answer, dear reader, is infrastructure virtualization. You see, existing management consoles we mentioned still define physical views of virtualized resources, which is like having to manage virtual machines on a physical server by assigning the specific memory addresses they use - wholly unnecessary overhead.

The same philosophy applies to managing multiple servers: Why do we need to know where the virtual machines are running? Why not just treat the entire multi-server infrastructure as a virtualized flat space of resources that are allocated to specific functional goals?