The state of virtualisation

Giridhar Lakavilli looks at the next crop of virtualisation customers

Everyone in the IT industry will have heard about virtualisation and cloud computing unless they have been in a state of deep sleep for the last few years. I got to hear about it four or five years ago, when I was involved in the final stages of a product release for enterprise backup and recovery.

Product management said we had to support at least 1,000 clients and the product should work in all kinds of network configurations, such as VLANs, dial-up networks, typical LAN and so on. In the engineering team, we had to figure out a way to prove our product met the requirements defined by the product managers.

One of the quickest ways to do so was to write spoofed clients. We were able to run 10 to 15 in each machine, all physical, and to get to about 200 clients. However, the figure – 1000 – and the simulation of the various network configurations remained a dream.

With the introduction of virtualisation software, we got the right number of beefy servers, created close to 200 virtual machines (VMs), connected them in various network configurations, and were able to prove that the product did meet the scalability figure. In fact, we pushed the number to 2,000, well beyond the requirements of the product management team.

There has been a lot of hype over private cloud. VMware with vCloud Director, a host of startups as well as Microsoft with its Hyper-V and Opalis-based solutions have all started pushing organisations to believe that private cloud is the next big thing in enterprise IT.

So is there a solution for the private cloud? When we started doing proof of concept with this, we visited prospective customers. What we saw and heard was a slightly different story than the one being told on the online forums.

You could divide organisations into two broad categories: the ones that had just got on the virtualisation bandwagon and, for example, were considering or had implemented server virtualisation, and were completely satisfied. These organisations typically had a maximum of 30 to 50 physical servers.

The second set of organisations had a larger number of physical servers – typically close to or greater than 100 – and were beginning to need more than what server virtualisation had provided. These were more about being able to group the servers and better monitor them.

Talking to different prospects, the features that most caught my attention were group creation and self-service portals. Indeed, many of the organisations we visited had at least two IT administrators, and it is hard explaining the advantages of using a self-service portal to create VMs when most are happy with their standard management interfaces.

The fact is that many customers with five to 10 physical servers do not see a need for other virtualisation-related software.

So who are the virtualisation customers of the future? They will be datacentres and organisations with an in-house IT engineering organisation. While datacentres are moving towards the business of hosting in the public cloud for customers, organisations with in-house IT engineering teams need setups that can be implemented quickly to achieve scalability or various network configurations.

There is also a set of large organisations that are comfortable using public cloud offerings like those from Amazon. These organisations need nurturing, as they aren't necessarily happy about each user having to enter a credit card number if they want to use the solution.

Organisations with 30-50 physical servers will be satisfied with server virtualisation offerings and will be looking at add-ons such as analytics. Customers with 100 or more physical servers will need to better arrange their VMs in groups, but may not need a self-service portal.

Giridhar Lakkavalli is the head of vmUnify solutions at MindTree