Virtually Ready for Primetime
Nov. 22, 2006

Virtualization is one of those technologies that always sounded great in theory, but left a lot of enterprises shaking their heads when it came to using it in a production environment.

There’s something ephemeral about the very word, which conjures images of rows of those hollow PC shells you see in furniture store displays. Somehow, virtual machines don’t seem as real—certainly not as substantial—as physical machines, which have blinking lights and hum and actually consume electricity.

It’s no wonder that many IT managers have been reluctant to entrust their critical business operations to a virtualized environment. Sure, virtualization was fine for testing and development, where it delivered a lot of bang for the buck by running multiple applications and operating systems independently within the same box. But, for production—well, that was a different story.

All that may be about to change. Earlier this month rivals Microsoft and Novell announced plans to optimize Novell’s SUSE Linux-based Xen virtual machines on Windows and Windows virtual machines on Linux. The big breakthrough of this agreement was that the two vendors agreed to support customers using a mix of each other’s products.

On another front, VMware will soon launch Virtual Appliance Marketplace, a Web store that sells software applications with their own built-in operating systems. These “virtual appliances” are delivered as a single file, ready to run in a virtual machine. Microsoft is also jumping on the virtual appliance bandwagon, with plans to bundle Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 database in a ready-to-run virtual hard disk format as part of a 30-day trial.

The virtual appliance model uses slimmed-down versions of operating systems (usually Linux) that are optimized for a specific application. By delivering better isolation and security, as well as cost-savings and efficiencies in deployment and management, virtual appliances may be the vehicle that makes virtualization commonplace.

It’s just a matter of time before virtualized environments—from applications to servers and storage—become part of every enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Of that I’m certain—well, virtually.

Posted by Andy Mazer 11.22.06

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