|
Miss a week and the world undergoes a virtual transformation. Well, IDC stats go public and have everyone buzzing at any rate.
Because
Virtually Speaking didn't appear last week, this week we offer a double
feature that opens with market projections and closes with open source
virtualization trends.
First up, IDC released its latest report on virtualization penetration. There was little to be surprised about, but there was a lot to talk about.
Miss a week and the world undergoes a virtual transformation. Well, IDC stats go public and have everyone buzzing at any rate.
Because
Virtually Speaking didn't appear last week, this week we offer a double
feature that opens with market projections and closes with open source
virtualization trends.
First up, IDC released its latest report on virtualization penetration. There was little to be surprised about, but there was a lot to talk about.
In
short, virtualization is moving along at a more rapid clip than the
research firm imagined when it came out with its previous projections,
so it's adjusting its numbers. The new figures forecast that the number
of virtual servers will rise to more than 1.7 million physical servers
by 2010, resulting in 7.9 million logical servers. This will represent
14.6 percent of all physical servers in 2010, up from 4.5 percent in
2005.
This is
bad news for hardware vendors, as server sales have already begun to
stagnate for units shipped at any rate (dollar sales for 2006 were
up). In its revised forecast, IDC now anticipates server sales will
grow by 39 percent by 2010 instead of a 61 percent increase in server
shipments it had predicted.
During
this time, IDC also sees the x86-based server market dollars shrinking
by 9 percent, from $36 billion to $33 billion, and actual unit sales
declining 18 percent, from 10.5 million servers to 8.7 million servers.
Before
you weep for the HPs and IBMs of the world, bear in mind that (aside
from the fact that these are only projections, not hard sales figures),
many of the systems out there will need to be upgraded to run
virtualized environments the way enterprises need them to be run.
As Nick
van der Zweep, director of virtualization and integrity server software
for HP, told ServerWatch, "For anything older than two years, new
equipment must be purchased [for virtualization to be deliver optimal
benefits]." Newer systems, he said accommodate larger memory loads,
which is vital to virtualization.
He also
notes that from what he's seen, "An application upgrade or new
application generally sparks a virtualization effort, at which point a
hardware purchase is not uncommon, largely for memory reasons."
It also stands to reason that as virtualization becomes more and more of an assumption, the OEMs
will tweak their servers accordingly to maximize their suitability for
virtualization. This is already evident with multicore processors.
Enterprises
may buy fewer servers, but the servers they will buy will be more
expensive and larger, and that may down the road redefine what makes
for a commodity server.
Open Source Options Grow
Shifting gears a bit ...
Open
source virtualization options are on the rise. While Xen has long held
court as the media darling, it's not alone anymore. SWsoft, the force
behind the OpenVZ project, which is now the basis for Virtuozzo
increased its stronghold. (Virtuozzo competes with VMware, despite
taking a different approach to virtualization.)
And in related news on Monday, Qlusters announced an increase in its virtualization capabilities and Xen support for openQRM, its open source data center provisioning and management software for physical and virtual environments.
The open source license is pretty much where the similarities end, however.
openQRM is licensed under the Mozilla Public License and is designed to integrate with Xen and VMware, while OpenVZ is developing the environment itself.
"The
philosophy behind the Qlusters architecture is that it is open and can
integrate with components already there," Ofer Shoshan, founder and CEO
of Qlusters, told ServerWatch.
As
such, the latest release of openQRM is designed to enable
administrators to change the memory consumption of a Xen partition
on-the-fly while making it possible to add, remove and assign virtual
machines to specific physical units on the host without restarting the
system.
Other
changes include the capability to migrate a partition from a small
Xen-host to a larger one, to add or remove additional network cards for
partitions and configure whichever physical network card on the Xen
host traffic should be routed, and to extend a handed-over Logical
Volume Manager (LVM) device from the Xen-host to the partition without
restart.
SWsoft,
in contrast, carves out an environment all its own. Few vendors have
been in the virtualization space as long as SWsoft. Founded in 1999,
the company got its start in the hosting provider market at a time when
"virtualization" was unrecognized and far from understood. Eight years
and many acquisitions later
(including, most recently, the popular Parallels Software, which
enables users to run windows on a Mac), the company has made inroads in
both the hosting provider and enterprise markets.
Today,
SWsoft's products for the enterprise include its flagship
virtualization platform, Virtuozzo, and multiplatform control panel
software, Plesk. For hosting providers, it offers SiteBuilder,
HSPcomplete and PEM.
Launched
in December 2005, OpenVZ has been from its inception an active online
community, as evidenced by user behavior: In January 2006, for example,
the OpenVZ Web site had 1 million hits. In February 2007, the project
announced it had delivered 50 software updates, and the user community
had downloaded more than 2 terabytes of its virtualization software in
2006. Currently, its support forum contains around 10,000 message.
Last
year, it unveiled a live migration feature, which enables admins to
move virtual servers between physical servers without taking them down.
Last week, OpenVZ was one of many to jump on the Red Hat Enterprise Liunx 5 (RHEL5) bandwagon. The OpenVZ operating system will be available as server virtualization software for the RHEL5 kernel.
It's
already available in RHEL4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES10)
and openSUSE 10.1. In May 2006, Mandriva embedded OpenVZ software
directly into its Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 kernel. Now, OpenVZ
software is available as part of Linux distributions that include Debian,
Gentoo Linux and ALT Linux Sisyphus as well as the mainstream Linux
kernels (2.6.16 and 2.6.18). It also supports servers using x86,
x86_64, IA64, Power 64-bit and UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads processors.
Across
the pond at Cebit, SWsoft's announced another deal: Virtuozzo will be
bundled with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 beginning in the
second quarter.
SWsoft
will take a standard distribution of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and
add the Virtuozzo software to deliver one integrated solution to
customers. SWsoft will provide the first line of support for the
bundle, with Novell acting as a backup for all the unmodified
components of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Xen, however, is also included at the kernel
level, so in some regards SWsoft's win is primarily a leveling of the
playing field. Still, leveling against the market leader is no small
feat.
Read the original article: http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3667546
|
Get Informed 
