News Detail | Pro Drive IT

Virtualisation

14/11/10

Virtualisation is one of the current big buzz words in IT right now, but what exactly is it? Virtualisation has been around for decades, notable on mainframes used by large companies. Current virtualisation trends in the SME area are based around three core areas – Network Virtualisation, Storage Virtualisation and Server Virtualisation. The adoption of these technologies by SME’s over the last 5 years has been faster than many experts predicted, with most virtualisation projects being driven by a need to “do more with less”.

Network Virtualisation on modern Ethernet networks (defined as running multiple Virtual LANs, or VLANs on one physical network switch, in order to separate traffic for security or performance reasons) has been around for over 15 years since Cisco proposed using an existing networking format to convey tagging information that would indicate which VLAN the data packet belonged to. The IEEE stepped in to define a standard for this tagging information a year later and modern, scalable & interoperable VLANs were born.

Server Virtualisation has come to the forefront in the last 5 years with the combination of the inclusion of virtualisation technology/code into mainstream Intel and AMD processors and the release of “hypervisor” products from several large vendors, notably VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. A hypervisor allows multiple guest operating systems to run on the same physical hardware, making more efficient use of the resources available. Some of these hypervisors are provided free of charge with a reduced feature set and Windows 7 even comes pre-loaded with a second virtual machine configured to run Windows XP, to ease application compatibility issues with the new OS.

Storage Virtualisation is the key to really making Server Virtualisation work. With Storage Virtualisation the storage requirements of virtual machines (and indeed some physical machines) can be removed from the local hardware and placed on a Storage Area Network or SAN. The SAN can be managed centrally by an administrator, reducing the time and complexity of tasks like backup, archiving and recovery. Virtual machines can be moved from host to host with little or no downtime, and multiple new servers provisioned extremely quickly. The main issue with Storage Virtualisation right now is the high cost of the solutions compared to the other two areas, hence the slower take up in the SME market.

Virtualisation in all its forms has many advantages across all levels of business but it’s not necessarily a must have for all companies. A proper ROI calculation should be completed before making a significant move into this area, and there is no one size fits all calculator available. Many factors should be taken into consideration, not just the obvious factors of space, power and heat.