Enterprise Initiatives

Virtualization is another hot topic in IT today. It allows you to run multiple virtual or logical representations of physical machines, side by side on the same physical server. Many companies are putting strategies in place to consolidate servers and to reduce the cost of hardware, maintenance, power, and floor space. At my work we have a cluster of physical machines using VMWare that have allowed us to run 115 virtual servers on it. There is room for more and we will continue to move to that platform. Virtualization makes a lot of sense in the eyes of the system administrator.

So why is a software guy like me so excited about it? To me, it is much more then a way to control costs. It also allows us to be more agile, to react to capacity issues faster, deploy easier, and create faster applications. Allow me to expand on each one of these points. The following statements assume that you have a cluster of boxes with available capacity to add additional virtual machines.

Agile - How long does the procurement process take in your company? I have seen companies' server procurement cycles take from two weeks to six months. The norm in my world is about a month. A virtual machine can be created in 15-20 minutes without having to purchase anything.

React to capacity issues - On Friday at 10pm, your web site generates a ton of unexpected traffic which causes your servers to exceed their capacity and fail. Your systems administrator logs on from home and quickly adds five more virtual machines using a snapshot of an existing production virtual machine. In under an hour he has the system back up and running.

Deploy easier - Your application can be configured as a virtual appliance. This allows you to create a virtual machine that consists of the operating system and application software for all the tiers of your application and bundle it as a single file. Microsoft is leveraging this approach as a way to allow people to try out the latest version of Outlook without having to install hardware and software. Think about being able to deploy your multiple tier environment as a single file. Take that snap shot and deploy it at your DR site and you have knocked a huge chunk of time off your implementation phase.

Create faster applications - This is the topic that gave me the urge to write this post. Think about this architectural strategy for your web sites. Put all of your web servers, application servers, and database servers on virtual machines and create your virtual appliance. Since all of these virtual machines are on the same physical server, you could actually leverage the PCI bus instead of the Gigabit Ethernet. The PCI Bus is over 400 times faster then Gigabit Ethernet which should give you incredible response times for your application. What's even cooler, is that you can have your virtual web servers "sitting" outside the firewall in the DMZ while your application servers and database server is "sitting" inside the firewall. You read that right! Even though these virtual machines are physically installed on the same server, you can configure them to logically be located in different areas.

Think of all the possibilities. We all know the power of distributed systems. Distributed systems allow you to perform parallel processing across multiple nodes to achieve more work in shorter intervals. The downside of distributed systems is the cost of the physical servers and the management of software across the nodes. Enter virtualization. You can install several virtual machines at minimal cost and easily manage the software by updating one virtual machine and taking a snapshot. Then apply the snapshot to the other virtual machines.

To take that concept one step further, you can leverage this distributed model to create multiple virtual machines to act as an application server farm. If you are implementing an SOA and have an ESB in place, you can configure the ESB to load balance your services across these virtual machines to maximize your throughput.

The possibilities are endless. The point is that virtualization is more then just a great solution for consolidation and server management. Virtualization should be included as part of your application architecture strategy.