A slow start for virtualisation

Again, VMWare is working hard to ease the transition with its VMWare Converter application. The converter works well most of the time, says Ali, although online forums are busy discussing the several ways in which it doesn’t.

The easiest migrations are by companies running the latest apps on the latest hardware, which is unlikely to be the case in a smaller SME.

Businesses running old programs on Windows NT4 or Windows 95 are going to find the process a rough ride. “Managing legacy apps with legacy drivers, that’s where the problems come in,” says Ali.

Even if an app does run well in a virtual machine, some vendors, such as Sebel, may refuse to provide support – a deal breaker for many organisations regardless of size.

In some cases a work-around is necessary to appease the risk management division, such as a virtual to physical converter which can put the problem app back on a physical machine.

NSI recently installed this service within a power company which had decided that it had to receive the vendor support stamp at any cost.

And then there are some applications which are plain unsuited to virtualisation, no matter how smooth the migration.

VMWare works best at virtualising memory and CPU performance, which is around 85 percent that of a physical machine. However, disk input-output (I/O) is a big Achilles heel as it produces only 65 percent performance, according to Ali’s estimates.

These can include large Oracle and SQL databases or even just a file share.
Fortunately, few customers run these types of applications, says Oriel’s Wynne. “Maybe you’ve got one SQL server flogging its guts out,” but the rest of the servers are idling very low and are good candidates for virtualisation, says Wynne.

(Oriel’s own servers, which are all virtualised, average 7 percent CPU utilisation.)

The other weak spot is video. Infrastructure 3 doesn’t emulate video other than through a basic virtual 16-bit controller. Although it is possible to increase video buffer size, CAD apps and games are unusable.

The latest, graphically intensive version of Windows, Vista, can be virtualised without a problem. But Ali remembers one job at a large financial institution where a simple DOS program threw a spanner in the works.

The bank was consolidating 75 workstations ¬¬– slaves running a data reporting program called HiPortfolio ¬– to two ESX servers. The app opened a DOS window and rapidly ran through a list of file names at around 2500 a minute, too fast for a human eye to read.

However, the ESX servers, attempting to reproduce each command line graphically, ground to a halt ¬– even though the VMWare diagnostic tool showed the CPU, memory and I/O at idle. There was no diagnostic tool to show the video emulation process which had caused the shutdown.

The push for virtualisation will come from within IT departments as staff realise they can make their own jobs much easier and save their bosses money. The IT community recognises that this year, virtualisation is ready for the primetime, says Wynne.

The next time an SME has to upgrade its hardware, virtualisation will be a consideration for most of them. But few will move unless they have to.
“In many ways, SMEs demonstrate a lot of common sense in not moving to something that’s new, without the need,” says IDC’s Penn. “They don’t move until they have to, but when they do they move quickly.”

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