In February 2008, Fabio Cecaro, Ciaopeople’s DB Solution Designer & Service Architect, attended the  WMWORLS EUROPW 2008 in Cannes, France,  a remarkable  event organized by VMware Inc. An experience about systems virtualization.  Revolution.  A technology of great interest for any future orientated company.  Fabio tells us about it on Ciaoblog.

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More than 4500 participants from the EMEA area (Europe, Middle East, Asia), 100 sponsors, 3days of continuous work, more than 123 break-out sessions, nine 24 hour labs with more than 200 thinComputers, live presentations (solution Exchange) of all hardware and software innovations by all sponsors who work in the virtual field, these are the numbers of the real first great event on virtualization.

VMware Inc., a leading company in system virtualization, was founded in 1998 by the husband and wife team Diane Greene and Dr. Mendel Rosenblum (forefather of modern technology).
VMware Inc., with its incredible and non-stop growth, offers virtual solutions from datacenters to desktops.  Between February 26th and 28th, at  the colossal and breathtaking Festival and convention Palace (prestigious Cannes Film Festival site),  in Cannes, (French Riviera) the company organized the event to update and inform all those interested (Administrators, CEO’s, CTO’s, CIO’s, Developers, Journalists, etc) in the new products they will be presenting in the future, once again establishing their leadership in this field.

VMware has already organized similar events in the US:
• 2004  (1.400 participants)
• 2005  (3.500 participants)
• 2006 (6.700 participants)
• 2007 (10.800 participants)

VMware Inc. is used by over 100.000 customers all over the world of which:
• 100 % of Fortune 100
• 96 % of Fortune 500
• 94 % of Fortune Global 100
• 92 % of Fortune 1.000
• 85 % of Fortune Global 500

It has a partnership with over 10.000 companies.
2007’s turnover was 1.3 billion dollars; it is one of the software companies with the highest growth rates in the  world.

The company’s  leadership is such to be able to promote  competition among the major hardware vendors, that have always been “bitter adversaries”.  Some examples? IBM vs. HP, Dell, Fujitsu and SUN, Intel vs. AMD, EMC vs. NetApp, 3Tera, Pillar and Compellent, Cisco vs. Emulex and Brocade.  IBM HP and Dell already competed to be the first to produce servers with the embedded VMware operating system (ESX 3i), meaning on motherboard.  Microsoft is bending over backwards to present its virtual platform (Hyper-V) to the point of using an open-source technology (Xen Server) as its Hypervisor.
Citrix has recently acquired Xen to prepare something very competitive; Virtual Iron is spasmodically proposing its own solution (very similar to VMware) based on open-source Xen, but unfortunately they are not able to keep up with the pace.  Stefan Van Overtveld, VP of technology and innovation of BT (British Telecom) revealed that they have already virtualized 11 out of their 58 datacenters: “we have consolidated to free up space, free up power and free up capital”.

How are these numbers and this growth possible? Why so much attention?

What is Virtualization?

From Wikipedia:
Virtualization is a virtual creation of a resource that is normally physically provided.  Any hardware or software can be virtualized: operating systems, CPU, memory, disc- space, sub-systems.  More advanced virtualization systems allow to dynamically redefine either the characteristics of the virtual resource, or its mapping on real resources.  Virtualization allows resource optimization and makes it possible  to meet specific requirements in line with the classical on-demand paradigm.

It is nothing new, originally,  mainframes partitioned the resources (and they are still used in very old CED).  Then the age of Personal Computers came about, the age of Microsoft and Apple, so from centralization we moved  to decentralization, in other words, a revolution; finally the strong need to preserve data, lead to recentralization, and the  establishment of storages, cluster systems for high-availability and high-scalability. These systems are very hard to manage, to install and to maintain.  They are becoming more and more powerful but used less and less.  It is currently estimated that a system is used for only 10% or 15% of its power (IDC data).
It was in this way that resource virtualization reasserted itself, this time on x86 technologies at a lower cost, in a faster and easier way, at the same pace with industries and market requirements  of speed  and service.  Virtualization allows to make use of a system’s resources by “virtualizing” the system among different virtual machines, and presents  the following benefits:

• Server Consolidation
• High Availability
• Isolation
• Provisioning
• Disaster Recovery
• Virtual Appliance
• Green Datacenter
• Virtual Desktop

Server consolidation allows to reduce operating and hardware costs by more than 50%. The use of virtualization reduces installation time by 70%; companies save about $3000 a year for each virtualized server. This technology assures high-availability, the system allows a dynamic migration of virtual machines from one physical system to another, keeping the service always active in case of HW fault.  Moreover, virtual machines, being simple files, make backup procedures and HW disaster recovery, fast and simple.
In the past, if a company needed to start a new service, it was necessary to:
• Provide for the Hardware
• Install an operating system (CD, DVD)
• Apply patches
• Apply patches to the application
• Reconfigure the system

On average this process could take over one month, for a small or  medium company; for a datacenter, where these operations are better organized, it may take one week.  If more services must be activated, either the time or the cost of personnel is multiplied..
Virtualization allows to start a new system in about 5 minutes. With the help of ad-hoc storage side scripts or software,  it  is possible to create hundreds of systems already configured,  available and productive,  in  just a few minutes, all automatically distributed in the virtual data center.
Try to imagine how much money and time can be saved in the creation of an entire call-center, because virtualization is also about desktops, it is actually, the new frontier, the biggest challenge of the next months/years.

A real revolution.
Let us try to use the VMware TCO/ROI calculator.
(total cost of ownership) / (return of investment)
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/calculator.html

Let’s imagine to be an Italian telecommunications company named (test) who wants to consolidate their  datacenter operations.  We  have 100 physical biprocessor servers.  Without virtualization, in a three year projection, there would be a total cost of Euro 1.944.924, while with virtualization, over three years, we’d spend Euro 964.742, saving 50.4% with a 584.5% ROI.
We’d also cut down the number of physical servers to about 10, reducing cables, occupied space in CED, personnel costs and energy consumption .  And this is something pretty remarkable  considering the amount of  saved energy, which without virtualization would amount to 480.480 kWh/year, while with virtualization that figure goes down to  75.075 kWh/year, as we can see on the VMware green calculator.
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/consolidation/green

A big leap, a big change for the planet.
This is why the ONLUS, engaged in the conservation of ecology and ecosystems, rewarded and contributed to the development of this technology.
It is obvious why  there is so much attention from the  media, businesses, and information and technology world, but for many managers the change has represented something of a nightmare because they are unable to manage the budget that used to be aimed towards infrastructures.  Also, many system administrators are now terrified their role is pointless, while those companies who don’t have information infrastructures as their core-business, fear the creation of a hosting mecchanism able to offer services based on this technology, thus allowing the company no longer tend to the information section,  knocking down costs of personnel and management and concentrating only on business.

And now news from the event, what else is going to happen?

VMware presented remarkable new products that I will try to describe:

• VMsafe
• VService
• Site Recovery
• Storage VMotion tra Virtual DataCenter

Every virtual machine is made of files, these files are managed by a hypervisor which monitors and virtualizes resources. Consequently, protection against spyware, viruses and so forth is even higher considering that it is possible to create an application to monitor the potential presence of a virus.  It is like disinfecting your home pc by booting it with an antivirus disk (Vmsafe).
Virtual machines  are proper servers or desktops. They can become  virtual appliances, meaning customized servers with a specific application.  But those who work in this field know that very often a service is constituted by  various servers connected to each other in an architecture by means of  a functional goal. For example, a complex website usually includes a web server, a db server and a firewall. Now all of this is in just one application (vService) made up of different virtual machines connected to each other according to a precise scheme on a file.  Once loaded onto the virtual infrastructure, it captures all the necessary resources and functions, and can be repeated, if necessary, with a simple copy of files.  Now, try to imagine having two data centers, one is for recovery; well (Site Recovery) automatically restarts all the virtual machines in the website that for some extraordinary event have collapsed.  A limit of the past was the immediate moving of a virtual machine from one storage to another. This is no longer the case, meaning  that hypothetically it will soon be possible to balance the load between one datacenter and another in an easy and transparent  way for the service to run smoothly.    This is no longer “high-availability”, but “continous availability”. (storage Vmotion among data centers).
There are so many other new products, but they are to technical to describe here.
In short, once the machine is started, born from a simple software installed on personal computers (the still existing, vmware server, that can be downloaded for  free from www.vmware.com) we can move on to an endless world that is changing our lives and will keep changing them for some time.. 
Much attention and momentum was given to  desktop virtualization, because as mentioned earlier, this  is the big revolution with an impact on our daily lives.  Picture yourselves without a computer in your office, but only a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, with no installation troubles, no data loss, no money and/or time waste.

Fabio Cecaro
DB Solution Designer & Service Architect, Ciaopeople

VMware Virtualized Hardware Hotel

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