Virtual Servers (For Real)Virtual Servers (For Real)

Vendors Prepare
Anticipating Xen 3.0's appearance, VMware Inc. started giving away a "Player" in late October that lets users implement a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. It also has been expanding the capabilities of its commercial client software in an effort to gain market share among low-end virtualization implementations before Xen 3.0 arrives.

IBM with its Virtualization Engine 2.0 and VMware with its VMotion management software are building products to run multiple virtual servers from a management console. Such software will be needed to ease the strain of managing virtualized servers as they proliferate.

"What's going to happen very quickly is virtualization will emerge from 'How do I create virtual servers?' to 'How do I manage this environment?' " AMD's Lewis says.

Then, servers start competing with mainframes, where virtualization long has thrived. Hannaford Brothers Co., an East Coast supermarket chain, uses the virtualization built into IBM's zSeries mainframe to move applications off Intel hardware in its data center. To eliminate physical servers, CIO Bill Homa has SuSE Linux running applications in 26 virtual servers on the mainframe, saving him the need to manage 26 Intel servers, each running "at only 5% of capacity."

Homa also is consolidating AIX servers through virtualization capabilities built into AIX and IBM's Power 5 chip. He marvels that he has 10 times the computing power of five years ago, "but we have more space in the data center."

Still, it's getting more complex to run all those virtual machines. Hannaford has a payroll application that eats up more CPU cycles one day a week, and Homa would like to reconfigure the virtual machine on which it runs to use more CPU and memory on that day. To accomplish that, he'd need to implement the live reconfiguration capabilities of IBM's Virtualization Engine. Homa has focused on implementing virtual servers and consolidating hardware, but now he's giving thought to simplifying their management. With the number of virtual servers likely to grow with tools like Xen 3.0, he won't be alone.