Standards maximise virtualisation

Virtualisation offers clear value to business customers but faces challenges in delivering on this promise. The problem with virtualisation is vendor-based, with many attempting to either bypass standards or form agreements between themselves. This excludes other players from being able to efficiently virtualise their specific solutions.

Businesses look to virtualisation to enable consolidation and better hardware utilisation. Virtualisation also offers multiple instances of specific environments to be run on the same system, for example, and provides for accurate and effective capacity planning.

There is a downside to virtualisation; it does add complexity from a management perspective, but this and other potential cons facing the use of virtualisation are vastly outweighed by the pros for its use.

The biggest problem facing virtualisation is the lack of willingness for vendors to support industry standards that make virtualisation viable across the board. Virtualisation, by its very nature, forces interoperability between disparate platforms. Windows is often virtualised on Linux and vice versa.

This presents vendors with many interesting scenarios in terms of how to cater for this interoperability being demanded by customers while remaining competitive in terms of their own products.

Vendors have traditionally kicked against the question of working with each other in making virtualisation as reliable as possible for customers. However, customer demand cannot be ignored and the demand for virtualisation between heterogeneous platforms is not going to 'just go away'. There are two predominant approaches that are therefore being adopted by vendors.

Virtualisation, by its very nature, forces interoperability between disparate platforms.

Muggie van Staden is MD of Obsidian.

Some vendors choose to pursue agreements with other vendors in collaborating for the sake of interoperability between their platforms. The relationships of this nature in the market are still relatively young and it remains to be seen whether they will be successful. At the end of the day, these vendors are still competitors and while they are tenuously working together for the good of virtualisation, continue to debate on whose platform should form the foundation and whose is better left virtualised.

The other approach is to rely on industry standards which, if implemented properly, ensure virtualisation is possible no matter which platform is selected and nullify (or negate) the requirement for sticky vendor relationships which could turn ugly and do not benefit the industry as a whole.

The use of standards also offers a different conceptual approach for vendors. Instead of being seen to want to interoperate with another vendor's products, they can instead be seen to be pursuing interoperability with a standard; that in turn unlocks interoperability across platforms. This is something far less onerous and more understandable to clients. It also prevents customers from being held ransom by any one vendor.

When wanting to virtualise Linux, there are two predominant technologies: VMware or Xen. Both camps are working on a common standard for virtualisation. When these standards are fully realised, customers will be able to switch between them with much greater ease than what is currently possible.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has forged an agreement with Novell in pursuing interoperability with Linux for the good of virtualisation. While this may lead to better interoperability with SUSE Linux in particular, it isolates Microsoft products from the greater Linux spectrum.

Another part of the virtualisation challenge is the requirement for third-party solutions. If virtualisation is better integrated into operating systems themselves, with standards built in, we would see a far greater adoption of the technology. A third-party virtualisation tool is required in addition to the necessary licences for operating system products being virtualised.

This situation can also be averted with the use of open source technology. Linux has a far thinner layer of requirements for virtualisation. It also provides customers with a more focused and lightweight operating system, which can be better utilised for the specific applications required from its use in a virtual environment.

Furthermore, the choice of hardware platforms is far wider in the context of Linux than it is for any other operating system, adding to its popularity as both a virtualisation platform (called the hypervisor) and contained environment (the virtual machine).

In the real world, however, virtualisation is required to overcome the need for more than just one application environment. But until more vendors start contributing to the development of and implementing standards in their own products, the only way to get the most out of virtualisation with the minimum amount of risk and vendor finger-pointing is in the use of Linux from end to end.

* Muggie van Staden is MD of Obsidian.