Wednesday 23 September 2009
Virtualisation V1.0...V2.0...V3.0
In between doing some work on the Part 2 of the post series "Cloud are you ready" I thought i'd post in between with some thoughts related to Virtualisation strategy within the datacentre and how I think we need to change and knuckle down to start to get Virtualisation to do what it is supposed to do for businesses....do more with less yet provide more agility and flexibility.
Virtualisation version 1.0 in where the industry performed basic DC consolidation and sat reaping the benefits drinking Kool Aid has and still is currently the predominant phase. In V1.0 the Hypervisor provided organisations with extremely good performance factor, clever and turn key benefits to consolidate along with supportive functionality such as Vmotion, DRS, HA and excellent provisioning opportunities. It probably sounds a bit unfair to sum up current Virtualisation based on the hard work VMware and its development team has done so far, but I am sure that even VMware would admit for x86 Virtualisation to truly succeed in the datacentre and more importantly impact and become the defacto server platform within the Datacentre it needed to diversify.
This diversity was evident, they bought companies such as Dunes (Lifecycle and Stage Manager) and Akimbi for Lab Manager so hopefully this post doesn't come across like i'm saying VMware was not business ready or serious about Datacentres...they are and they got the hell of One app per server and Physical Bloated server consolidation off the ground so we could SAVE BIG BUCKS/POUNDS to invest into IT someplace else more effectively.
So enter the next phase of Virtualisation, stage 2.0 strategy which is built upon the feature rich business focused products that has evolved and grown in ecosystems of the big virtualisation companies like VMware. The stage still predominantly in the infancy phase (when say infancy stage I think my statement was backed up recently when about 5 hands out of 50 at a local London VMUG knew what Lifecycle Manager was) V2.0 builds upon and uses the solid Virtualisation 1.0 consolidation fundamentals. It uses the later end developed enablement technology in Vmware such as available orchestration tools, chargeback, capacity management tools and self service portals to streamline IT delivery and services. Further afield of Virtualisation strategy and one step higher up the technological stack is Cloud Computing (or strategy), this combines large amounts of the technology that surrounds the V2.0 Ecosystem such as web based service catalog interaction and billing, the granual chargeback tools, rich API and many more to provide this in many different service delivery methods to organisations. And whether it is a Public or Private Clouds they all have to use such technology and process automators to ensure they meet cost and service expectation.
So the question I have is do we see V2.0 strategy completely in full adoption yet within the industry and ready to evolve further? Based on feedback from events and from blogs etc I'm not entirely sure it is, Maybe I'm not asking the right audience but I do feel adoption is not large enough yet to say it is there.
Based on the fact that businesses want to do more with less and how how extremely process centric IT is today I do feel it is the right thing for IT in organisations to move to this V2.0 engine and fast. Without this automation and interaction more with our business processes we will suddenly start to hit the same issue that were hit with Physical sprawl and our Virtualised worlds will mean an untenable situation to provide justification for further investment.
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