Virtual Infrastructure Diversity... and the Need to Manage it.

I can't take credit for the following observations... They were simply handed to me by one of Cassatt's best account executives, who spends endless days speaking with CIOs and operations personnel who manage huge, diverse data centers - and who frequently miss these important facts. He's noted that "Virtualization" is being inaccurately subsumed to mean the software hypervisors purveyed by VMware.

However, the Truth is that virtualization is multi-vendor, multi-technology, and inherently heterogeneous. So: How will these diverse technologies be managed in the future? Here are some observations:

1. People are confusing ‘Virtualization’ with VMware (but remember, there are more types of virtualization than just hypervisors for software!)
2. VMware’s scope is limited to X86 Platforms. Most organizations have more than X86.
3. There are other types of Virtualization within other platforms (Example: Mainframe LPARs, Solaris containers/Zones, HP VPARs).
4. There are even Virtualization alternatives in X86 (XenSource, Xen/RHEL, Xen/SuSE, and SWSoft Virtuozzo and others).
5. There are different types of Virtualization (JVM, VLANs in the network domain, SAN & NAS in the storage domain, not to mention Incipient and 3Par).
6. VMM Virtualization is an OS feature and it’s price will be commoditized to $0 over time. Evidence:
   - Historically LPARs came with MVS
   - Sun does not charge extra for Containers/Zones
   - IBM AIX & HP-UX don’t charge extra either
   - JVM’s are free.
   - VLAN-ing comes built-in into Switch Firmware
   - You can get NAS for free or pay for specially-tuned version in Proprietary Hardware (NetApps)
   - Watch out in the SAN-space but it will be interesting to see where that goes with iSCSI and 10Gig Ethernet etc.
7. A comment on X86 VMM-pricing:
   - Red Hat will deliver Xen for free in RH5
   - SuSE will deliver Xen for free in SuSE 10.x
   - Intel supports it for free in Intel-VT chips
   - AMD supports for free in their Pacifica chips
   - XenSource costs 25% of VMware and will eventually be acquired by somebody who will give it away for free as part of something else
   

Thus we see that there are nearly dozens of types of "virtualization" that need to be managed collectively - many of them are already present in data centers, and many will be available for free (or nearly so) in the near future.

This is the next impending management crisis - management, automation, and optimization of virtualized computation, containers, storage, and networking.