Editorial

In the beginning

In the early days of virtualization, scientists with big companies like IBM, HP, and XEROX (and others) were attempting to run more than one program or flavor of operating system on a single piece of hardware. Mainframes after all are built upon these principles, so it's not a new idea. Now fast forward a couple of decades... What is new is that it's now been brought down to your local server and in some higher-end pc's even to your higher-end laptop computers.

What does this all mean to the average computer user? Well, quite frankly, not a bunch ..yet, as most people don't know, or don't have the ability, to virtualize their environments. Another limiting factor is that the proprietary operating system vendors haven't caught up to the hardware vendors when it comes to VT technology. So, even though your new PC or laptop may be a smokin' hot dual core (duo), the operating system hasn't caught up.

Where does this leave you? Well, your PC hardware may be smokin' hot, but it's sitting idle most of the time, and you don't leverage the VT technology at all. In fact, the majority of your PC's and even your servers go 90% under-utilized. Even when idling, a PC or server consumes roughly $30 worth of electricity per month and generates unwanted heat. With a 90% waste rate, that's not the best use of your money. Wouldn't it be nice to use what you've paid for (hardware) and only spend what you have to in order to do your business?

Alternatives

Closed Source, aka proprietary, software is produced by corporations and is either made available commercially or is developed for internal consumption. Proprietary software usually requires a license fee for it's use. VMWare is a vendor that provides VT software that allows you to take advantage of your VT capable processors. They have several flavors of offerings beginning with workstation (PC) VT software all the way through server side VT software offerings. As you go from Workstation licensing to Enterprise Server pricing, the costs increase. A typical server deployment with support from VMWare begins at roughly $70k (and that's only the software), with a yearly fee of roughly $14k. That's a bunch of money, and there are alternatives, read on.

Open Source. Open Source software is software created by engineers that are not necessarily paid for their efforts. Their efforts are shared within a community and are most often free (not as in free beer) for their use within your environment. An example of Open Source software is an operating system called Linux. Linux is an operating system that is mature and has a wealth of supporting organizations (Redhat, Novell, HP, DELL, IBM and others).

Why should I trust Linux, I've never heard of it? Well, whether you know it or not, you use Linux virtually every day. If you own a Sirius or XM radio, TiVo?, iPhone, VZWFios tuner, DishNetwork? tuner, Linksys router... you're using Linux. When's the last time you had to "reboot" your device (blatant M$ jab)?

Who writes to Virtualization standards

Novell and XenSource have come a long way since they began working with the Linux core OS optimizing it for XEN to become the power-house that it's poised to be. Why not just lay out the big $$$'s and do VMWare? It's technology has been surpassed and supplanted by XEN, and it's way to costly for most businesses to even begin to consider as a viable solution

What makes XEN such an attractive alternative? It's running on OpenSource software (a.k.a. Linux), just like VMWare, but the proprietary components that are provided by VMWare are absent. Well, sort of absent, they are available through Novell and other vendors and OpenSource offerings. For most fortune 500 companies that manage hundreds to even thousands of servers, the management component is paramount. Novell offers ZOS (ZenWorks Orchestrator) for management of these deployments, but what does the average small to medium sized business need to manage, maybe two to three servers? The biggest over-riding reason to run a XEN deployment: Cost, it's OpenSource software, you are free to use it.

If you can manage two to three servers now, you'd surely be able to manage two to three virtual servers from a single console, right? Absolutely. Managing a server that houses multiple VT servers is no different than managing to keep your desktop organized.

My belief is that with the advent of Open Source solutions for VT, and the commoditization of the server, that many more small to medium businesses will leverage this technology to gain a competitive advantage.