Thursday, May 29, 2008 Ng: The virtues of virtualization By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
ONE of the most popular technology today is vir-tualization, and it has become more so with the increase in power rates.
Virtualization is a software that allows you to work with one computer but making it appear as if there are several computers or servers doing the job.
For instance, if you buy one big Unix server, you need to develop applications for it.
Naturally, you don’t want the development of new applications to be together in the actual system that the office will use. Since it is too expensive to buy two servers, you slice one server so that you have a test server and a production- used server. The magic of the software is that it can divide a server into two, so that even if there are numerous errors in the test server software, such problems will not affect the actual production server.
Since you have servers now that are dual or quad core (which actually has four chips), you have many servers that are very much under-utilized. Many IT departments are now consolidating their servers so that they will save more.
There are a good number of companies that have over 30 or 40 servers that they have accumulated over the years. Many of these servers are still Pentium machines. Companies can can upgrade to no more than five virtual servers.
Then they can easily save well over a hundred thousand pesos a month easily in power, cooling and administration costs.
Microsoft is bundling a virtual server called Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, which makes virtualization even much more affordable now.
However, while I extol the virtues of virtualization, I also see many companies who get into virtualization for the wrong reasons–mostly to be able to save on software license cost. This is a misconception.
Most software developers are aware of virtualization and other technologies, and have noted these in their licensing terms.
According to Christopher Voce of Forrester’s, “for most licenses, you need to buy one for every person that you are benefiting from, whether it is running on a virtual or physical machine. You cannot engineer your way around licensing requirements. Most companies are aware and have made provisions that you cannot use technology as a way to cut corners around licensing.”
While it is not foolproof, one way to save on licensing is to study the licensing costs. Another way is to look at software that is licensed per processor. If they are licensed per processor, then the various virtual machines running on top of the servers probably do not need to be licensed individually.
I am studying a report that says the worldwide server market grew only 3.5 percent year-on-year in terms of revenue. But overall shipment of servers topped more than two million which, in unit accounts, actually increased 7.8 percent. The market for servers was $13 billion for the first quarter.
The two IT giants, HP and IBM, finished the first quarter of 2008 in a statistical dead-heat when it comes to calculating worldwide server revenue and market share, according to a May 27 analysis from IDC.
For the quarter, HP’s worldwide server revenue was $3.77 billion against IBM’s $3.65 billion; third was Dell with $1.6 billion, followed by Sun Microsystems, which totaled $1.4 billion.
