Yes I am... and don't call me virtually...

Seriously though... Virtualization technologies have been around for many years now. Yet many small businesses have yet to still even consider virtualization into their environments. Is it the cost? The cut-over? The lack of knowledge? Support? All of these things probably have some merit into why organizations have yet to consider or even look at products like HyperV, VMware, and Sun Virtual Box to help consolidate their power, space, and cooling issues in their data centers and help create what could be centrally managed virtual devices that run on larger pieces of hardware resources. Maybe it's that concept that escapes many businesses and puts them in a state of fear that prevent them from even considering the concept of virtualization.

Recently, I had the privilege of taking the VMware Fast Track course (my second VMware course this year) on the vSphere 4.0 instance of VMware. There I learned about what was new in vCenter, Networks, Storage, and all the inner workings of ESX and ESXi. Here, I saw some really interesting points that discussed key differences between bare-metal versus virtual systems.

- Physical Machines are difficult to move or copy, are bound to specific set of hardware components, often have a short lifespan (about 3 years), and requires direct contact to upgrade the hardware (which impacts that systems availability).

- Virtual Machines are easy to move and copy between physical hosts because they are encapsulated into files (which are easy to transport) and independent of the hardware resources available. They are easy to manage because they get isolated from other virtual machines running on that same physical host and are insulated from physical hardware changes.

This makes me wonder, and I can't confirm this but is my opinion nonetheless, but when blade technologies from Dell, HP, Sun, Cisco, etc... were built, virtualization really had a means to take off because of the scalability of these systems and the fact that with these technologies we could consolidate all our hardware resources into a single pool. From here this is where I believe VMware really took off and ran away with the virtualization market with the development of vCenter.

vCenter is a centrally managed software device that runs on a Windows operating system that is used to managed multiple hosts and virtual machines. It is also used to manage other hardware resources available to your data center (physical hosts that fall under your instance of vCenter). I'll get into the finer tuned details of vCenter in future blogs.


(VMware, 2010) - Edited by DHood to include VM layers



*This blog is meant to provide a fundamental understanding of virtualization technologies (more specifically VMware). The views and opinions expressed in this blog do not reflect those of VMware or any other technology vendor.