Serving up a New Lease of Life on the Virtual Office Farm
by Nikole Manktelow
Australian Financial Review, June 6th, 2006
Virtualisation is becoming more popular with small business as providers offer better continuity and easy deployment, says Nicole Manktelow.
Better known at the big end of town, virtualisation – splitting servers into multiple virtual machines – is becoming popular and could change the way many customers access services.
As the technique of making one server act like many permits several groups of users to use the same server, it greatly increases the efficiency of each machine.
"Virtualisation is a hot topic in the server area at the moment," Gartner Vice-president of research Phillip Sargeant says.
Breaking servers into multiple machines offers some important benefits.
"It's a mechanism to improve the asset allocation of servers" he explains. "Typically you would have one or two users on a server and the server would be pretty under-utilised. In the virtualised model, you could have a lot more users."
"Prior to virtualisation, it was estimated that the average utilisation of most Intel-based servers was 20 – 30 percent. Now, with more users on machine that number has been pushed up."
The improvement is, however, hard to quantify. "We're still trying to get a handle on what might be as it varies a lot between organisations," Sargeant says. "But even if it's just a 5 to 10 percent improvement, it may stop an organisation from having to buy another box in six months time."
Server virtualisation is already very popular in large companies, but its more recent uptake in more medium-size business is of interest, says Sargeant. "And for customers looking for hosting [of applications on another company's machines], providers can offer continuity and easy deployment," he adds.
Managed hosting provider, Bulletproof Networks is overhauling its business to go virtual. "We're putting in a completely new server farm for this project alone," general manager Lorenzo Modesto says. The company's "six-figure investment" will be well worth the effort explains.
"If Bulletproof can deploy managed hosting faster that's an obvious benefit," he says. "At the moment, deployment times for managed hosting, from end to end, include time for ordering, waiting for the delivery and configuring the hardware. The delivery alone can account for 10 to 20 days."
Bulletproof expects a virtualised hosting model will simplify matters for both its own operations and customers. "Right now, customers have a box that they rent or buy outright. We even let customers bring their own, provided it has the relevant warranty, and we take over managing it – it's the management, not the box, that's important to us," says.
These rent-a-box days are numbered. "Customers won't have to worry about hardware becoming dated almost immediately, like a car depreciates when you put it on the road; or getting slow as soon as the demands on it increase."
"VM [Virtual Machine] hosting is going to mean the customer or developer never has to worry about hardware refresh cycles again. They just buy server capacity, however much they need."
Bulletproof expects to launch customer pilots in the next quarter.
One customer, Info Salons, is likely to be one of the first on the new virtual farm. The company provides a badging service for attendees at conferences and industry trade shows.
Information Technology manager George Hirst is looking forward to some additional freedom from the new hosting environment. "At the moment we're on a shared hosting service, so if we want to put on other components they have to be verified, to ensure they don't disrupt the others on the service," Hirst says.
"For example, to generate a bar code, we have to use third party software. Bulletproof had to test it so that it didn't affect other clients' software on the machine. They had to schedule the test into their workload and it took about a week."
"That's the sort of component we'd want to put on freely in the future, without having to go through the testing cycle."
Bulletproof is currently finalising agreements with hardware vendors and will turn from software to VMware, which largely pioneered virtualisation for the Intel-based server market. Other server virtualisation products available include Microsoft's Virtual Server, the open source favourite XenSource for Linux environments and, for IBM's own range of processors, the IBM Advance Power Virtualisation product.
Virtualisation is well established in the mainframe world, says Sargeant. "It's been around for two or three decades. And with the Unix it has been around for a number of years," Sargeant says. "In the Windows hosting space it has only been around for three or four years and really has only gained traction on the last couple."
The concept has been boosted most recently by favourable changes in software licencing. Traditionally, if a single piece of hardware housed several virtual machines, each instance would need its own licence.
"Microsoft changed its positions so you can break a machine into multiple virtual machines and pay for one licence," Sargeant explains. IBM has also adopted similar changes to its licencing regime and Sargeant expects the more flexible attitude will catch on with other makers.
"It's not absolutely clear out there in the software space, but it's getting better," he says.
It's hardly surprising that virtualisation is gaining interest, since few organisations would knock back the opportunity to squeeze more value from their hardware."
If there's one notable pitfall, however, it may be the temptation for a company to bite off more than it can chew – to create more virtual machines than it can handle.
Managment, according to Sargeant, is quickly becoming an important issue.
"People are implementing products to break up physical machines into lots of logical machines. The next challenge is to manage all those machines," he says. "You might have had 10 severs and have broken them into 40 machines. You now have to manage those as 40 different machines."
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