From The Chair - 

The Myth of Virtualisation?

Earlier this year I read an article which challenged the perception that virtualisation is the universal panacea that will solve all our problems. Clearly virtualisation offers many advantages and must be a key component of any forward looking IT strategy, but is it really delivering all the benefits that the marketing hype would suggest?

So what leads me to ask this question? Well, firstly, when we talk about virtualisation we usually mean Windows virtualisation. You could argue that UNIX and VMS have been offering virtualisation capabilities for years. What’s the proportion of Windows servers to everything else in your IT operation?

Several virtual servers can run on one physical server, but as we adopt virtualisation, how many sites have decided to take advantage of the disaster recovery capabilities that virtualisation offers – and doubled up on their server count! Standby kit can, of course, be used productively if there is a load that can be shed (perhaps development work) should it be needed to take over from a primary server in the case of a disaster – but how many sites have configured their systems in this way, or is 50% of the kick sitting idle but still consuming power? And with more eggs in one basket it is likely that any mechanical, electrical or equipment failure in the data centre will have a significant effect on services – the historical link between servers and business process has been broken. 

On the subject of power, servers typically account for less that half of the power used in the data centre, and so a 50% decrease in the number of servers is likely only to reduce your power by 25% or less. Has that been factored into your return on investment calculations?

So, although virtualisation is undoubtedly a ‘good’ thing is it as good as we have been led to believe? Has my UNIX background blurred my judgement or do you recognise some or all of these issues? Let me know!

Mail me at chair@hpug.org.uk  with any comments you may have.

John Owen
hpUG Chairman

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