Virtualisation gaining in credibility

With the launch of its latest infrastructure offering, Infrastructure 3, VMware has claimed that virtualisation technology has hit the mainstream.

According to the company’s A/NZ managing director Paul Harapin, virtualisation was moving out of cloistered development environments into wider deployment across the enterprise and into verticals such as education.

Demand amongst offshore developers and call centres for “always on” virtual desktops linking back to head office datacentres was also on the rise.

“The virtualisation market is now established. Customers are talking about virtualisation across the board,” he said.

Supporting this claim, Harapin said of VMware’s 20,000 global enterprise customers, 90 percent were now using VMware to host frontline business applications, while 25 percent of users were now standardising on virtual infrastructure.

“We will also see the average deployment size is moving from the 100s to the 1000s within the next year,” he said. “There are currently 1,000,000 virtual VMware servers in operation.”

The company was also beginning to gain traction in the SMB market with some 500,000 downloads of its free VMware Server beta since February.

Despite these successes and a ten-fold growth in local staff numbers, Harapin said VMware was cognisant of the growing threat of Microsoft’s push toward virtualisation with its Viridian virtualisation hypervisor and Carmine virtualisation management platform.

As such, the company was increasingly opening its source code to ISV partners and vendors and had recommitted itself to the open file format to maximise its interoperability.

“In two years Microsoft will have the virtual partitioning piece but what we will have will be very expansive compared to what was developed a few years ago,” he said.

The current step on that path, VMware Infrastructure 3, is aimed at simplifying operations, increasing service levels and enterprise-wide deployment, VP datacentre & desktop platform products Raghu Raghuram said.

The current version features two new technologies – Logical Resource Pooling a (LRP) and Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS).

LRP allows users to view computing resources as a united pool for allocation to applications when and as needed. DRS allows for the automatic movement of an application across physical hardware to find the right level of resourcing required.

Version 3.0 is compatible with 30 operating systems including Ubuntu and Solaris 10X86 and also features automatic load balancing and automatic availability for when physical hardware is added or taken away, or fails in the resource pool, the company said.

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