Bob's blog

Really virtual or virtually real?

It's been a really interesting week for me, especially since it didn't involve any sort of plane travel. There were a few trains and a bit of snow though. Unfortunately, the snow and the ice were both real which made for some interesting mountain biking this morning.

This virtual topic is pretty timely given the innotek announcement this week. It adds a great developer desktop tool to the xVM portfolio. I've been playing with Parallels and the latest OpenSolaris developer preview build, so I'm excited to try VirtualBox.

But that was really only a part of the virtual topics that I've been talking about all week. It all started innocently enough when I met a friend for lunch to catch up on some of the projects that we're working on. He's a master at connecting people and has a both an active blog and a series of networking breakfasts with interesting panels. The funny thing is that I met him seven years ago when he was at a start-up and we've just recently reconnected via another friend. So, we talked about the reach of the virtual world and how easy it is to keep updated via tools like Facebook or LinkedIn. However, sometimes you need the in person interactions to have those spontaneous and unexpected results. I'm going to be travelling for a while, so we can switch back to virtual communications now.

I also spent some time talking about virtualization as a feature of utilization vs. virtualization for management. We've heard the about the low average utilization on a per server basis and how server sprawl grows as individual servers are provisioned for individual applications. We've done a lot of work looking at server consolidation whether it accomplished via domains or LDOMs or zones or some combination. We have the ability to manage those virtual systems and their associated applications, networking and storage and there are tools to help plan and manage that.

What's really interesting is virtualization for management and how that can help with large scale web infrastructure. Project Caroline is a SunLabs project designed to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. It can help enable software-as-a-service to help make systems dynamically available and scalable. While this is still a project, I like the approach because it's not only about scaling but also about managing. There's a tendency for fast growing sites to continue to add resources without reviewing the existing architecture. This is absolutely understandable because of the time to market pressures and need to meet user demand quickly. However, I think the ability to add an abstraction layer that can take dynamically grow resources would give sites a chance to better leverage their infrastructure.

As virtualization technologies continue to mature, I think that capabilities will grow in both areas. This becomes more important as we get more cores and threads in a single server. As for the personal virtual interactions, I'm fascinated to see where that goes. In the meantime, lunch meetings in New York are always good.

Posted at 12:28AM Feb 16, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |