Sunday September 24, 2006

Virtualization in Paris

Last week I presented on server consolidation & virtualization technologies in Paris, at Sun's SunUP-Network conference. We had a good turnout, around 100 customers from around Europe. There was a tremendous interest in virtualization, and some of the customers are quite a long way down the path of deploying virtualization.

I presented on OS virtualization vs Hardware virtualization, and talked about the differences between the two; including some of the performance studies we have been doing.

Some of the interesting tid-bits from the discussions:

• Over 90% of the attendees were considering or currently deploying virtualization technologies
• Some are already using VMware - all but one were using it for Windows consolidation, for consolidating many small older servers to increase server utilization. We're doing lots of exciting work with VMware on our new Galaxy servers, including the X4600
• Many customers are already planning to use the up and comming logical domaining capability of the T2000 SPARC systems for consolidation of many small SPARC systems
• Zones is increasingly being used as a consolidation technology, given that it is the lightest weight overhead of all the solutions (it has the lowest virtualization performance overhead and minimal OS administration requirements). One financial customer has standardized on using Containers/Zones for all new application deployments, and has completed internal standards and training for new deployments. This will allow them to template their provisioning strategy, and make it easy to migrate applications around between servers.

All in all a very interesting meeting and set of discussions!

( Sep 24 2006, 07:46:56 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]