Panel warns against virtualisation pitfalls

Enterprises should exercise restraint in deploying virtualization technology, panellists warned in a session at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco. Otherwise they won't see any benefits.

Currently only 1 percent of newly shipped servers will be used for virtualisation, according to data cited by Virtual Iron Software. The technology has a five to six percent share of the overall server market.

Jim Fister, lead technical strategist with Intel's digital enterprise group described the technology's market share as "low and static".

He cautioned that a server consolidation strategy increases hardware utilization rates, but doesn’t cut down on maintenance costs because administrators manage a number of hardware

"I'm not entirely sure whether that's going to save me [any money]," Fister said.

Consolidation isn't a means to an end, he argued. Enterprises should pursue it because they are looking to cut power consumption or to free up servers that can be used for new innovative projects such as service oriented architectures (SOAs).

"As soon as people move away from consolidation and start to think about neat new uses, […] virtualisation will start to do a little better."

Kevin Leahy, IBM's director for Virtualisation Solutions and Strategy chimed in that consolidation is just a "starting point".

"The real value is as you start to improve the business resilience and application performance. Compelling reasons for consolidation is that it frees up the people."

He pleaded that management software is a vital part of virtualisation, as the software enables enterprises to automatically move around images and dynamically allocate system resources to an applications during periods of peak demand.

"Virtualisation stalled in the market place. Customers started with say 100 physical machines and when they were done, they had 400 virtual machines. When they did that, they made their jobs more difficult."

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