vnunet.com comment: Clive Longbottom on virtualisation

Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom unravels the mystery of virtualisation

Virtualisation is one of those words that seems so innocuous, but is more like the proverbial can of worms.

Ask vendors for a definition, and you'll get one. But is the definition correct, or are vendors taking a narrow view of virtualisation that plays only to their strengths?

And the majority of organisations see that they have only limited virtualisation if any, but is this the case?

Virtualisation is a means to an end, but it's an important end. If we take a very basic definition of virtualisation in that it takes a group of similar physical assets and presents them as a single logical asset, and that a single asset can be made to look like multiple assets, then we can start to look at where we are in the world of virtualisation.

Let's start at the base level: the network. Are we working in a virtualised environment here? You bet. TCP/IP is near ubiquitous, and not only can we roam our own networks at will, we can plug a single cable into a socket in the wall and we are a peer with everyone else's network, should their security settings so allow.

Going up a level, how about the servers that we are using? OK, not so far along, but we've been clustering systems for years.

With multi-core technologies coming along with built in virtualisation, we're going virtual whether we want to or not. And the likes of IBM with the z/Series and Series i5 have been doing virtualisation at the CPU level for a long time.

VMWare showed us the way, with Microsoft following along, and now Xen has disrupted the market and all of a sudden, operating system virtualisation is a commodity that will be built in to the next generation of OSs.

Storage area networks (Sans) give a virtual look at all the storage assets within the San, and software can increase the reach of this to network attached storage and direct attached storage.

And the use of federation across multiple databases gives a virtualised view across the data, enabling us to look at single sources of truth and to minimise data redundancy.