Broad Virtualization - Part One 

In our last Virtualization Rollout Strategy Entry we discussed understanding the budget and mentioned broadening the scope of what gets virtualized. This entry will be a deeper dive on that subject. When most people think of virtualization they think of only one layer of virtualization; virtualization of the physical server hardware. The goal of the next several entries is to open you up to the other possibilities.

Moving the virtualization discussion beyond just the physical server hardware will make your virtualization project more successful. Even if you have already rolled out virtualization, this entry is for you. What are some of the other components that can be virtualized? Over the next several entries we will look at each of the virtualization layers.

Network IO Virtualization; when you are deciding what machines to virtualize you will begin to tag some applications as more virtualization viable than others. If you are like most customers you will look for applications or servers that don't require many compute resources and ones that don't have much IO overhead. That network IO overhead is a real concern, it can cause significant impact on the Physical Host and is most often a bigger limiter to virtual machine count then compute resource consumption.

The result is an incomplete virtualization project. You virtualize the low IO, low compute servers but not the entire environment. If one of your virtualization goals was server consolidation, this prevents you from achieving that. Network IO virtualization is a game and could allow you to consolidate almost all the servers in your environment.

When Network IO becomes a problem, most companies add additional 1GBE cards and some even add a 10GBE card, but both have issues. With 1GBE cards you simply run out of slots, especially on a Virtualization Host. With 10GBE cards your really providing too much highway. VMware and others have resolved this with technologies like NetQueue. NetQueue allows you to better allocate that 10GB of bandwidth but you need a card that supports it like those from Neterion or Intel.

We have written about Network IO virtualization in more detail, but the net effect is it allows you to virtualize more of your environment by bringing in physical servers that you may not have virtualized in the past. 

Next up, Storage Virtualization...