VMworld: VMware talks up the software datacentre

COPENHAGEN: The datacentre of the future will be based around commodity hardware with software providing more and more of the capabilities that traditionally required specialised infrastructure, according to VMware.

At the VMworld conference in Europe, VMware senior vice president for cloud infrastructure and management, Raghu Raghuram, outlined the trends that are shaping datacentre infrastructure, and how VMware aims to provide the tools to deliver on this vision.

Raghuram said that falling hardware costs mean organisations will soon be able to virtualise all workloads in the datacentre, with many enterprise servers expected to be capable of running as many 320 virtual machines within a few years.

"We're in the first stages of the world becoming standardised across a virtualised architecture built on commodity x86 hardware," Raghuram said, claiming that around 59 per cent of all workloads globally are already virtualised.

At the same time, applications are changing and storage requirements are ballooning, especially as developers start to connect applications to social networks like Facebook, according to Raghuram.

"They are finding that the new systems process so much data, a SAN would become prohibitively expensive for that application," he said.

This is leading to a new storage architecture being developed based on the local storage directly attached to servers, but pooled by a storage layer across the datacentre to form a single global namespace, Raghuram claimed.

Meanwhile, availability issues can be addressed by automated management tools that simply work around hardware failures by moving workloads if necessary.

"When a failure happens, the software simply carries on working, but flags the failure so that an engineer can show up to replace the hardware at some point," Raghuram explained.

But the ability to move workloads dynamically in this way also needs networking and security models to become more flexible.

VMware is proposing to address the network issue with the VXLAN standard, which virtualises network connections, separating a virtual machine's IP address from its physical location, so that networks do not have to be rewired as workloads move around.