VIRTUALIZATION

COST MAYBE A FACTOR, BUTTHE ARGUMENTS AGAINST

VIRTUALIZATION ARE GETTING WEAKER.

VIRTUALIZATION is arguably one of the most important data center technologies to emerge in the last decade. 

By abstracting the application from the physical hardware

that runs it, virtualised workloads are far more flexible, mobile and available than traditional applications running on non-virtualised

hardware. In fact, virtualization technology has permeated IT so quickly and thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine a business without it.

Still, deploying and managing virtualization presents a variety of challenges that some organisations just can’t handle Issuesby themselves. 

For data centers that aren’t on board yet, its time to examine the principal concerns that are stalling the adoption and expansion of virtualization and look for ways to address those issues.

Perhaps the biggest sticking point for virtualization is cost. In a recent TechTarget survey that questioned more than 900 IT professionals about data center virtualization from July to September 2009, 28% of respondents said they avoided virtualization because it’s just too expensive. 

COST AS A DEAL-BREAKER That’s no big surprise. Virtualization often requires newer and more powerful server hardware that can adequately support the performance of numerous virtual workloads. Doing that may require a server with four, eight or even 16 CPU cores, along with up to 16 GB of memory or more. Nearly 20% of respondents indicated that their existing servers were not adequate but that buying new servers wasn’t an option.

Network architectures may also need to be updated before adopting virtualization. For example, a single 1 Gbps network connection may be totally inadequate to support the traffic from 10 or 20 virtual machine (VM) instances at the same time. Storage is another area

that is frequently overlooked. Virtualization deployments are best served with fast Fibre Channel SAN for VM images and periodic snapshots.

That's it from Vince Bailey