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05.18.06
Virtualization Solutions - Same Motivations
 By Steve Duplessie
I've been writing a lot about virtulalization lately, and the process has been clarifying. I figured out a few things, such as the fact that none of the stuff we are talking about is new. Most of it is really old actually.
Perhaps the most interesting conclusion I've come too is that all virtualization (computer, anyhow) solutions we've ever come up with have followed identical financial paths. First, they attempt to solve capital expense related problems. Second, the attempt to solve operating expense related problems. And third, somewhat related to second, they attempt to keep people from jumping off buildings - or solving people scale problems.
A storage example would be Volume Manager. VM came about because of capital economics - i.e. when Seagate came out with a 4GB disk drive that was only 1.5X the cost of a 2GB disk drive, people bought them - lowering their capital cost per MB. The problem was that the operating system could only deal with a 2GB disk, so in reality what you added was a more expensive 2GB disk - until VM made it look like (2) 2GB disks. Phase two of storage virtualization was when we came out with RAID arrays - taking a ton of disks and putting them into a single box making it look like whatever we wanted. By doing that we got huge operating efficiencies, because managing a million individual disks is harder than managing one big box. Now we are at stage three, where we have a million big boxes, and people are going to jump of the building.
We are focused on keeping people from killing themselves, so most of the solutions to the Multi-box management problem are just moving the virtualization element to the next step in the process - looking at the boxes instead of the disks, etc. That will help, but it's not the end game, it just is like all the others, a band-aid.
Servers are now doing what storage did years ago. Servers cost too much and we have too many, so use virtual machines instead. Smart. Not new, but smart. Mainframes and big Unix boxes have been doing this since the dawn of time. Now we can do it on Windows and you'd think we've seen the second coming.
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