Server virtualization growing in data centers
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The server virtualization trend continues, according to data center managers and analysts at this week's Infrastructure Management World. But  some users were skeptical about trying open source virtualization options.
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TeamQuest predicts worthwhile data center trends for 2005
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(InfoWorld) - For a technology that's supposed to make computing easier,Â virtualizationÂ is becoming quite complicated. The Hewlett-Packard Technology Forum that starts Monday in Las Vegas will feature as many as 87 user training sessions on virtualization, more than any other category, organizers say. This is a recognition both that virtualization continues to gain in popularity but also that end users have a lot of questions. The HP Technology Forum (HPTF) is expected to draw 7,000 attendees. It coincides with the HP Software Universe event expected to draw 3,000 people to Las Vegas, though to a different venue than the Technology Forum. Despite the appeal of virtualization as a way to use IT resources more efficiently, the technology adds a layer of complexity that IT managers may not be prepared for and may reduce the anticipated return on investment. The number of virtualized servers deployed by businesses is exploding "like bacteria in a petri dish," said David Gee, vice president of marketing for HP Software. Users say they face the same management issues running a virtual environment as a physical one. "I have to track and monitor who gets access to what, who created it. Are they allowed to do this?" Gee said. Virtualization can make a single physical server act like multiple logical servers, improving server utilization. It allows one server to run multiple software applications simultaneously, reducing the number of computers needed. While virtualization is commonly used in server environments, it's also being used in desktops, storage arrays, networks and for disaster recovery. But using virtualization to consolidate the number of physical servers doesn't mean your management duties shrink proportionally. CA Inc., a maker of IT management software, reported in March that 44 percent of 800 IT professionals surveyed globally "were unable to declare their virtualization deployment a success." The survey, conducted for CA by an independent firm, showed that 28 percent of respondents failed to see the return on investment (ROI) they anticipated, or couldn't determine if they had. Forty percent didn't achieve the cost savings they expected, or couldn't determine if they had. For one thing, companies don't necessarily save on IT staff costs by virtualizing, said Peter Richardson, director of product management at CA. If a company that runs 300 operating systems on 300 servers reduces that to running 10 virtual servers on each of 30 physical servers, it still has 300 OSs, and related software applications, to manage, said Richardson. Moreover, as more virtual servers are added, those 30 physical servers could be running as many as 500 applications. "You could go around universally and ask any client that has virtualized whether they reduced staff and the bottom line is no," he said. Staff isn't reduced because server sprawl continues, even if it's just virtual. Of course, CA is making the point to promote its own virtualization management software, which, Richardson says, manages virtual environments even if there are different brands of servers on the network. Server vendors offer virtualization management software, such as HP's ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management software. There also are a few good niche management software products available, "but there is still no fully cohesive virtual management suite," said Andi Mann, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. The HPTF sessions should answer a lot of questions for HP customers about whether virtualization will live up to its promise, said Scott Healy, chairman of the IT User Group (ITUG), which is co-hosting the HPTF with the user group Encompass. Healy is also a vice president of IT at Sabre Holdings Corp. "The promise of virtualization is when you are able to use servers for different applications at different times without impacting the general availability of your IT resources. Balancing that is a concern for any IT manager," said Healy.
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InfoWorld - Server virtualization has, without doubt, taken the IT industry by storm. It provides a cost-effective way to dramatically reduce downtime, increase flexibility, and use hardware much more efficiently.
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OS features virtualization technologies intended to help companies get more use from their hardware.
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Server virtualization technology has become firmly established in IT shops, according to IT managers and analysts at Infrastructure Management World.
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(InfoWorld) - The server market remains strong but industry research shows unit shipment rates slowing as companies buy fewer, but more powerful, machines. The effects of virtualization, the emergence of multicore processing and other consolidation efforts are evident in server sales and market share numbers in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker report for the third quarter, released Wednesday. A similar trend toward slower server unit sales growth is seen in a third quarter server report released Tuesday by Gartner Inc. IDC reports that overall server revenue grew by 3.5 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $12.9 billion, the fastest growth rate in four quarters. But IDC analyst Jed Scaramella points to slower unit sales growth, particularly for industry standard servers, as evidence of virtualization and other data center consolidation efforts by customers. "We have started to see unit shipment in the x86 market tempered a little bit," Scaramella said. Unit shipments of x86-based servers grew by 8.8 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.8 percent in the second quarter and 11 percent in the first. Virtualization is the process of enhancing server utilization by running multiple applications on the same physical server. Without it, some servers only operate at 15 percent to 20 percent of capacity. Companies are also buying new servers with dual-core or quad-core processors that offer more computing power than older models with single-core processors. Thus, customers can enhance their data centers' capability with fewer servers, Scaramella said. The IDC and Gartner numbers show no change in the market share rankings, based on revenue, of the leading server vendors. IBM Corp. led with 33.1 percent market share on a 6.6 percent revenue increase to $4.28 billion, compared to the year-earlier quarter. Hewlett-Packard Co. held onto second place with a 26.3 percent share as its revenue declined 2.1 percent to $3.4 billion. Dell Inc. holds a 10.5 percent share on a 3.8 percent revenue increase to $1.36 billion. Sun Microsystems Inc. followed closely with a 10 percent share on a healthy 15.8 percent jump to $1.3 billion. Scaramella says Sun has rebounded from weakness a year ago, when its sales fell by 5 percent. Since then, Sun has introduced its Niagara line of servers and servers running Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors, a rival to the dominant Intel Corp. processor. "Overall, Sun has been focused on performance per watt. They've been at the forefront of it," Scaramella said. Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. ranked fifth with 5.3 percent market share on a 9 percent revenue decline to $690 million. The remaining vendors collectively held a 14.9 percent share on 4.4 percent revenue growth to $1.93 billion. Â
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'Data Center 3.0' initiative gets rolling Cisco is selling a new obscenely large switch, tapped as the lynchpin of its "Data Center 3.0" virtualization initiative the company has been gabbing about for monthsâ¦
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Dell has announced the availability of virtualization services that aim to help enterprises draw up and implement their virtualization plans -- and it'll help you choose from its own hardware and software portfolio too of course.
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Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 handles the new server chips optimized for virtualization, takes regular backups snapshots, is easier to use and costs less, says reviewer Jonathan Hassell.
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(InfoWorld) - Later this year, Intel will help server network interfaces take advantage of the major recent advances in datacenters: multiprocessor systems, multicore processors, and virtualization. The company unveiled at Cisco Systems' Networkers user conference a pair of chips for server network cards or motherboards. The Intel 82598 10-Gigabit Ethernet Controller is set for production in September, and the 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller is shipping now to system and component vendors. The company did not disclose pricing. New and emerging technologies are boosting datacenter processing power and helping enterprises take advantage of the systems they've invested in, but network connections are still catching up. They have become the bottlenecks of new, faster datacenters, said Sunil Ahluwalia, a product line manager in Intel's LAN access division. The chips introduced Monday include multiple queues, virtualization capability, packet prioritization, and new storage networking features to break that bottleneck. For example, until now, the chips Intel makes to handle communication between servers and storage or the LAN have essentially just had one path in and out of the system. Sorting out which packet goes to which processor or core, for example, has been a job for the CPU itself, and a strenuous one, Ahluwalia said. It can take all of the CPU's processing power at times. The new chips have multiple queues and software for placing packets in those queues. With 32 transmitting and 64 receiving queues per port, the 10-Gigabit chip can move packets in and out of all the server's processors and cores, balancing the workload and taking advantage of the server's power, Ahluwalia said. The Gigabit Ethernet chip has four transmitting and receiving queues per port. Using the queuing system, the chips can also give certain packets priority so thatÂ important functions can take place quickly over the network. With the chips, Intel also introduced Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) to allocate packets to different virtual machines on a server. For this feature to work, virtualization software vendors will have to make their softwareÂ cooperate with VMDQ. Intel is working on this with VMWare, XenSource, and Microsoft, though it does not expect those vendors to have compatibility in place by September, said Steve Schultz, an Intel product marketing manager. In addition, the controller chips can work natively with iSCSI storage networks. The 10-Gigabit card also has some features designed for use with emerging FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) technology, Ahluwalia said. An FCoE standard is still being worked out, and the chips don't have FCoE itself, Intel said. With the 10-Gigabit controller, Intel upgrades from a PCI-X bus to the faster PCI Express bus for the first time on a 10-Gigabit Ethernet product. With the new performance features to offload tasks from server CPUs, the chip will be able to achieve full 10Gbps throughput while taking up on 10 percent of CPU cycles, Ahluwalia said.
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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Each skinny server houses eight processors. Plug a few together, and voila! A high-performance machine.
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(InfoWorld) - In 2006, many enterprise IT groups saw the potential in virtualization, rushed to consolidate servers and subsequently propelledÂ VMwareÂ software to a market-leading spot. As 2007 begins, VMware's prices are under attack, just as more CIOs look to virtualization to control server and storage sprawl and tame data center power costs. For starters, VMware rivals XenSource and Virtual Iron Software have launched new open-source alternatives, undercutting VMware on price. Also, new processors, such as IBM's Power 5 and upcoming Power 6 chips, and new operating systems have virtualization capabilities built in, negating the need for some additional software, says Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group. Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 OS includes a virtualization feature it calls Containers. MicrosoftÂ is expected to release a beta version of Windows Virtual Server in the first quarter of 2007 and ship it a year later. That's good news: As virtualization features become part of the hardware or the OS, software providers will have to offer useful extra features, Ryder says, such as automated new software testing or security patch management. Virtual Iron introduced Version 3.1Â of its virtualization platform in December for a license price of $499 per socket--compared to $2,875 per socket for a comparable VMware license. XenSource also introduced new virtualization products at sub-$1,000 prices. Both XenSource and Virtual Iron build their proprietary products on top of the open-source Xen platform for virtualization hypervisors. (A hypervisor lets a computer run multiple operating systems at once.) VMware's products are not based on open source. Meanwhile, middleware vendor BEA Systems is making its own cost-cutting move. In the first half of 2007,Â BEA plans to releaseÂ WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), a version of its Java application server that includes Liquid VM--a BEA-specific Java Virtual Machine that lets Java applications run directly on a hypervisor without requiring an operating system to be present. This will let users substantially reduce the amount of computer power, lowering the hardware costs per application, says Guy Churchward, vice president and general manager of the Java Runtime Products Group at BEA Systems. Initially, Liquid VM will work only with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor. Analysts advise CIOs planning for virtualization in 2007 to think strategically, not just tactically. "To really make virtualization work you want to do it so end users access capability, not just specific machines," Ryder says. "That's only going to be possible if you take a strategic approach," he says, noting that virtualization needs to be applied to storage, networking and the introduction of new software, not just servers. Mike Williams, CIO for the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), learned a lesson about thinking strategically when he did a virtualization project in 2006. (The DCMA, a federal Department of Defense agency, places contract managers inside companies fulfilling defense contracts for weapons systems, jets, military equipment and parts.) Williams deployed VMware, reducing the agency's number of servers to 160 from 560 and the number of data centers to three from 17. But that move taxed the WAN when all the network traffic converged on the three data centers. His advice: Optimize the WAN first. Still, Williams likes the results. Before virtualization, DCMA replaced about one-third of its 560 servers annually at a cost of about $2 million, Williams says; virtualization cut that expense to $560,000.
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(InfoWorld) - Managing transportation logistics is all about handling scale. As transportation management services firm Transplace added consumer goods companies such as Del Monte, Office Depot, Home Depot, Auto Zone, and DirecTV as customers, it needed to quickly bring server capacity online. Already planning a hardware refresh to support continued growth, CTO Vince Biddlecomb decided to bring in server virtualization at the same time so that he'd have a more scalable, flexible platform for that anticipated growth. Biddlecomb uses EMC VMware on his Sun servers mainly to support Oracle databases and J2EE applications on BEA's WebLogic Web server. He liked the fact that the technology was operating system- and hardware-agnostic, as his datacenter supports a range of technologies. And he found the virtualization approach to be less complex than, for example, running his Oracle databases on an IBM Power6-based System p 570 server, which he had considered initially. "We have all 12 instances sit on two logical partitions. We can configure the CPU and memory for each, and share when they are not busy," Biddlecomb says. But adopting virtualization required a deeper investment in datacenter hardware, Biddlecomb discovered, because virtualization changes the fundamental character of what is being supported. "You look at it as a pool of memory and CPUs. You just drop a couple VMs to increase capacity," he says. But treating servers as instances of capacity from a large pool of resources means that pool has to be kept available and running well. To do so, Biddlecomb discovered he needed to beef up the network I/O capabilities of the physical servers to avoid network traffic contention across the VMs sharing those ports. "We put more NICs in to them, since there is more network activity going on," he says. He also discovered he needed to beef up his SAN storage to support all the VMs that began to be created and to provide sufficient failover capacity in case of failure. "You can very quickly suck up 500GB or 1TB of storage for the VMs," Biddlecomb says. Although you no longer need storage in the servers themselves, you need more storage in the SAN, and that storage tends to be costlier. The more fine-grained your servers, the more storage you need, Biddlecomb notes. He likes to have more, smaller virtual servers so that each has a specific purpose that lets it be added or deleted easily without worrying about other applications that could be affected. But with 20GB of overhead for each virtual server, that approach can quickly eat up storage. Altogether, the use of virtualization roughly doubles the cost of a physical server, Biddlecomb says. He spends about $12,000 for a Dell server with extra NICs, plus $6,000 for VMware, and $5,000 for the associated enterprise storage. Because he had already planned to replace all his servers, there was no additional sticker shock from the fact that all physical servers needed CPUs from the same family, but most enterprises would require a complete server refresh. "You need to commit to building that infrastructure," he says. Biddlecomb also notes that the CPU-family restriction will limit how he can deploy virtualization in the future, and force him to forgo incremental technology improvements until the next server refresh. He's already been forced to do so: "We'll stick with our Intel servers even though the AMD [Barcelona-class Opteron] servers look to be better for memory management." One way he will work around that limitation in the future is to put physical servers into one of two clusters, one inside the DMZ and one outside. That way, he can stage his hardware refreshes by cluster, rather than do everything at once. Ultimately, Biddlecomb sees the use of virtualization as cost-neutral when it comes to the hardware side. "But you get a large savings in administration," he says. He has about 120 virtual servers spread out over 30 servers, administered by just two people. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank
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Syska Hennessy, an engineering, technology, and construction company, unveiled this week a unique design for cooling datacenters that would allow companies to pack almost double the number of servers into a datacenter space.
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Large vendors such as Microsoft and Citrix are expanding into the field of Microsoft virtualization that VMware has long dominated.