Virtualisation has the potential to solve many of the problems plaguing the data centre, VMware chief scientist and co-founder Mendel Rosenblum argued in a keynote at the recent VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco.
Virtualisation currently, is mostly used to consolidate non-mission critical applications, allowing firms to increase the utilisation rate of their hardware.
More advanced features such as VMware’s Vmotion or XenSource’s XenMotion enable the live migration of workloads between physical servers, allowing firms to pool servers and assign resources as workloads demand.
But the technology is capable of far more, according to Rosenblum. “The virtualisation layer today is just scratching the surface,” he told delegates.
“Virtualisation can provide a steady stream of innovations. It is not just a one-time blip. It is a whole new infrastructure.”
The technology adds an abstraction layer, referred to as “pixie dust” by Roseblum, that unties the hardware from the operating system and user applications.
This uncoupling allows for new ways to manage hardware, applications and data centres, argued the scientist.
“The challenge is to find really hard problems that can be solved in the virtualisation layer,” he said, adding that as the number of applications for virtualisation grows, its adoption will increase.
VMware showed off three research projects demonstrating how virtualisation can be used in new ways.
Instead of moving virtual workloads between servers, Rosenblum demonstrated a research project that allows for storage to be relocated to a different device, regardless of the underlying standard.
Virtualised storage networks typically demand that all devices adhere to the same standard, such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI.
VMware also showed off a way to obtain virtual appliances at a much faster rate.
A virtual appliance is a bundle of an application with an operating system, for instance a browser running on its own Linux distribution with bolstered security, or a stack of middleware applications.
Currently appliances have to be downloaded in their entirety before they can be executed. With virtual appliances measuring several hundreds of megabytes, downloads can take long times.
Rosenblum demonstrated the firm’s Streaming technology, which ensures that virtual appliances download the most critical components first. This allows them to be booted while being downloaded.
Rosenblum suggested that the technology could allow for a hybrid model, combining local applications and online services.
In a third demo, VMware showed a way to use virtualisation to create high availability systems.
The virtual machine monitor would copy every execution for a virtual system to a second machine, allowing the second machine to run in the exact same state as the first one.
When the first machine crashes, the second will automatically take over and continue executing the application.
VMware typified the projects as research, adding that they have not yet been put on a product roadmap.
Rosenblum challenged developers to come up with additional problems that could be addressed through virtualisation. “The opportunity is here to do a refresh of the data centre in the right way,” he said.
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