I have visited a number of customers recently. The discussions are usually straight forward where I provide them with a download of our current products, I tell them about things that we are doing in the future and along the way I ask them some questions about trends that they are seeing with their businesses. It will come as no surprise that enterprises are trying to keep up with their current requirements while also squeezing out increasingly flat or dwindling budgets to do something new. Many are turning to virtualization as a way to do more.
So who cares? CFO's care. I went out to visit a leading Fortune 500 company based on the West Coast of the US. Keep in mind I am planning to discuss our server platforms, why I believe they are leadership on performance and power and also all of the great new virtualization features we have recently introduced or will intro in the future. Before we get started they proudly walk me through their new datacenter and I stop in front of a rack that has two servers in it. Two 2U two processor servers. It is right next to another rack that has four servers in it. I inquire as to why both racks are only partially full and I receive a response that says one is owned by Finance, one is owned by a business unit. IT just manages them. You can look at this two ways. The glass half empty way would be that they are wasting an incredible amount of datacenter space and they are hopeless. The glass half full way would be that this is a great opportunity to really deliver value to this company's bottom line by first convincing them that physical consolidation (full up their racks) is important, then showing them a path toward application consolidation and finally sharing a vision of datacenter virtualization that includes compute, storage and networking. Their CFO will care.
IT employees care. One theme that seems to be coming through loud and clear is that people who drive some form of virtualization are usually considered as innovators or leading edge thinkers within their company. I have heard the term "IT Hero" to refer to someone who has delivered on a high ROI project, usually these days through the use of virtualization. I have met a number of IT folks at conferences and during visits and it is uncanny how many are trying to dig for more product information and how eager they are to hear about what new features we're putting into CPUs, chipsets, networking devices. A quick search of Youtube found this case study (here) that sums up the sorts of things I have heard.
It is also increasingly important that all of this stuff works well with the software, VMM and OS vendors product offerings. I know we are working closely with all of the ecosystem players because if we come out with an amazing new feature in our components it would be wasted if the VMM, OS or software didn't take advantage of it. There is some interesting banter here (here) about some of the pros and cons with virtualization. We are busy working on features that improve the performance and simplify the experience end users have when they virtualize. Why do you care about virtualization? What are you doing today that you couldn't do a year or two ago that has been made possible because of virtualization related technology?
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S_Poulin
in response to: Mike
Mike,
Performance is important because it determines how much you can consolidate on to your newest server. You are also right that the biggest consolidation benefit comes from smaller apps that are underutilized. If you have a larger app (like your SQL database) that takes up all of the performance of a four processor quad core server as measured by it maxing out on CPU utilization most of the time, then moving that to a virtual world simply to consolidate doesn't make a lot of sense. If you're into virtualization purely for consolidation then start with all the small underutilized stuff that delivers the best value (sounds like you're already there)
Now, you're in the minority when it comes to provisioning a physical server in 30 minutes. Imagine a large corporation that is getting dozens of requests daily for new servers or compute resources. It takes them days, weeks, maybe a month to procure, receive, install, provision and test a new box. For them, starting up a VM and assigning the resource in hours is a huge improvement. They can also mandate that for certain workloads developers stay in a virtual environment. This allows them to pick one server, say a four socket quad core, provision VMs until it hits some sort of pre-set utilization level, then install the next 4 socket server and constantly stay in front of the needs. If they're really good they can live migrate the workloads on to a new server if there is a demand spike, they can implement disaster recovery easier or they can just save a little money by getting the CPU utilization up. The better the performance of the box the fewer servers they need to buy.
As for whether mission critical or IO intensive will make it to a virtual world, I think time will tell. In the scheme of things we're in the infancy of virtualization on x86 servers. Most servers are going to have some form of embedded hypervisior in the near future. The more folks like yourself play with the technology the more you seem to find things to do with it. There are already solutions out there today that take diskless blades, match them up with a SAN and virtualize the switch. Then when someone wants a server they get a virtual compute node, virtual switch and virtual storage volume. They are doing absolutely mission critical things with these configs where billions of dollars in commerce are involved. For many people virtualization is proving to be a competitive advantage that adds to their company's bottom line if they are able to deliver the same service better than their competitors, or deliver a new service cheaper.
We're seeing the consolidation wave hit mainstream now, but in my opinion there is so much more to happen. I predict that non-virtual deployments will be the minority in under 5 years. What do you think?
I completely understand this whole virtualization thing. I have attended numerous presentations from VMware, Cisco and other who are pushing this new paradigm of the month. They tell me that I can optimize my underutilized servers into a single box that is now running more efficiently and therefore consumes less power and requires less cooling than the separate boxes did. Ease of deployment, recovery and management is really neat as well. (Even though I can deploy a physical server in 30 min start to finish). The part I can't wrap my head around is performance.
I ask if I should place my exchange server and enterprise SQL Server on the same box and the response is no, you just want to do it on boxes that are underutilized. If I look at the CPU and mem usage of those two servers, there is plenty of headroom to combine them. The reality of it is that even with a TON of go fast disk under the VM, having those boxes share the same physical box reduces performance by a measured 30 to 40 percent.
Where I see the benefit of VM is the small little apps that you want to compartmentalize so you can divide administrative responsibility to the divisions who are requiring the app. However, in the context of “the enterprise” I cannot see mission critical, I/O intensive apps making to a VM box. That is the fact that keeps getting left out of these conversations.
We have been running tuned GSX and ESX since day one and have over 20 servers consolidated onto a pair of big honkin Quad Quad-core boxes with enough memory to make an elephant jealous. So I have the real world experience to back up my question. What about performance?
Mike