Virtualization is the first step of a long walk called Grid Computing

Monday, January 30, 2006   |   5 Comments   |   addthis
Today's virtualization barely permits us to disregard what kind of resources we really have inside our servers. Companies like VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc. are offering solutions to share (although still not in a dynamical way) CPU power, memory, storage and partially networking within a single server (or a cluster). Companies like Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, etc. are offering solutions to share applications within a single server (or a cluster). If you think these technologies could be just refined and nothing else, think again. In our near future virtualization will permit us to disregard where our servers are located in our datacenter (something VMware is trying to approach with VMotion technology). Then, in a farther tomorrow, virtualization will also permit us to disregard where our servers are located among multiple datacenters, even of different companies. And so on, up to the final goal of disregarding everything but the application we are trying to use. That application tasks will be processed in a distributed way, among all available datacenters in the Net, which is possibly called Grid Computing (while the pay-per-use of Grid Computing is possibly called Utility Computing). Benefits of such a distributed environment are huge:
  • maximized available resources usage
  • increased computation power
  • increased resources availability
  • maximized high availability
just to name a few. Virtualization is going in that direction and someone is already trying to reach those results. But there are millions of technical problems to solve, from scheduling to security, from accounting to system management. And without a common virtualization framework we won't reach the final goal anytime soon. So if you asked yourself why VMware is trying to establish virtualization standards this could be the answer: VMware is looking for grid computing much before any other company. If you feel Grid Computing a fascinating subject you should absolutely read the free IBM Redbook Introduction to Grid Computing. Thanks to David Marshall for speed up this post writing.

Comments

Novell is also pushing hard into these areas as well with their strong development contributions to the Xen project and the OCFS2 clustered file system. Both features will be included in their upcoming SUSE Enterprise 10 products due out in May. They are talking about Xen virtual machines being stored on OCFS2 volumes that are mounted by clustered servers. This should provide easy and quick portability of Xen virtual machines between servers.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, January 31, 2006 4:15:00 AM 

The above looks like a Novell Ad considering that Red Hat has far more developers in Xen and has open sourced and included the Red Hat GFS cluster filesystem

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:39:00 AM 

Not trying to sound like an ad (honest), but where does SWsoft and Virtuozzo fit into all of this? Seems like they have a lot of customers running a lot of virtual servers.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, January 31, 2006 4:11:00 PM 

Hi there and thank you for commenting!

I think technologies like Virtuozzo could possibly have a place on top of virtualization technologies like VMware, introducing a further abstraction layer before the application virtualization provided by companies like Citrix.

By Anonymous alessandro, at Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:04:00 PM 

Virtualization is an important step in attempting to disconnect the application from the hardware. The reality is virtualization does nothing for reliability, only availability. Until someone starts helping applications run more reliably (where a fabric of computers understands what the application needs - likely through declarative descriptions) virtualization can only go so far.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, February 14, 2006 5:29:00 PM 

Post a new comment

Virtualization Congress 2008

© 2003-2008 virtualization.info
Sitemap