Virtually Insane?

• Replicating/Cloning from one SAN Array Vendor to another,
• Migrating a VMware VMDK File format to an alternative Hypervisor vendor such as Microsoft with VHD,
• Migrating from one NAS vendor to another NAS Vendor,
  
• Running a J2EE workload between two middleware stacks i.e. Weblogic and Glassfish,
• Restoring backup jobs from one vendor onto another (even within the same vendor)
  

To address cross Hypervisor migration, within the Server Virtualisation industry we have the Open Virtualisation Format (.OVF). As Server Virtualisation is more my bag I will use this example for the rest of this post. With OVF the industry has got together to build a standard for portability of Virtual Machines, bear in mind before you run off shouting EUREKA this isn't live migration, to migrate requires minimal downtime as it only works on cold migrations which is still a pain in the rear, however this means you can in theory move from one Virtualisation vendor to another by using export/import capability with OVF.

Unfortunately even with functionality that enables us to address the common interop problems in the datacentre such as replication between different array vendors and migration between Hypervisor Vendors, being humans and never satisfied the most common groan I hear is that they never actually provide 100% confidence and functionality that the original abstraction layer did, so for example with OVF you can't migrate "a la" Vmotion style between hypervisors. They also add large volumes of overhead and support, you need someone to operationally support VMware, you need someone to operationally support SAN Virtualisation arrays etc, and additionally they can end up actually costing more if you do not do complete TCO analysis on the actual solution being acquired to address the problem in the first place.

This leads me to the conclusion even with the limited knowledge in IT I have on such topics that unless large volumes of innovation and collaboration occurs we are never likely to see such technology or initiatives occur where we the customer or end user have this reduced overhead penalty for portability. Being the cynic I am, I am seriously starting to think that solutions that address problems are merely a level of abstraction that is pushing the problem faced higher up the stack for something else to be affected or to deal with, additionally the increase in layers means yes you got it more support and TCO costs. So based on my theory for example lets look below at how much abstraction is required to enable OVF functionality, and how this compares to abstraction of the application environment of yesterday;

As you can see the cost of gaining OVF means this functionality adds 2-3 more layers of abstraction in order to work and be fully exploited, and lets not forget the increase in Software cost/renewals in order for the Vendors to develop and support such features, lets also not forget the fact we have underlying components which are required to reach the goal.

Quilt, its a nasty thing

My concern

So what am I getting at here? One minute I am whinging about abstraction the next I am praising it, I guess its a bit like Marmite with Abstraction, you either love it or hate it. But to summarise my concern is this, the more I hear about new technology that helps me to solve another problem the more I see a level of abstraction being introduced into the stack, this to me means that it now means more software purchase costs, more ongoing OPEX costs of that software, more layers of operational complexity, more concerns and arguments with my lovely ISV's on support statements i.e. and all round more TCO on products that already struggle to have a good TCO.

Moving forward and being so young and naive would it be unreasonable to hope that the industry vendors look to reduce this overall use of abstraction and to combat a problem in a more practical way that ensures we do not have multitude of abstraction layers? Or alternatively is there any technology which addresses the above problems that I am not aware of that bloggers are aware of? (on the later it is not an invitation for vendors to tender so forget spamming me if you are a vendor!),

Additionally I am not looking to implement such technology (yet), but I do see this as a potential snowball growing in size as the move towards the demand from businesses for more of an agile and flexible datacentre environment, so I am interested to know if you think I am talking absolute rubbish or whether you agree....

# posted by Daniel Eason : 17:34