Continued Support for Virtualization
NetworkWorld recently did a series on the New Data Center. They touched on the products and best practices, talked about security, storage, the wan, and virtualization. What I was really looking for was an article that I read on virtualization called Into the virtualization realm, which included a great slide show that discusses 7 Ways to use Virtualization. I have been reading NetworkWorld at the office and was pleasantly surprised when I went to their site and found a vast amount of content on many technical and support topics.
Most companies and organizations that I speak with have already deployed some sort of virtualization. If you or your organization has not, then I would encourage you to start investigating virtualization. You can start by reading, listening or viewing information about virtualization on the Internet. Most virtualization tools can be installed on your desktop which is a great way to start. Here is a link to a ZDNet Whiteboard explanation about Virtualization an an article from NetworkWorld that identifies 10 free virtualization tools worth noting.
In mid 2006, I wrote about my experiences with our Server Consolidation Project and included an Update a few months later. Since that time, our use of virtualization use has doubled. In my opinion, Virtualization is a great tool that can help you to better manage your environment. Virtualization is not the data center killer application that will allow you to reduce your data center to one rack, however it is a tool that will allow you to consolidate many of you smaller and mid sized application servers into a single footprint. To be effective you need to find the right mix of applications, hardware and system resources (CPU, Memory, disk i/o) that works for you and your organization.
Every organization has different needs and different types of infrastructure, but now there are virtualization products that support many different types of platforms (Intel, Unix). VMWare, Windows Virtualization, Xen are the major players and another great place to start.
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