An open approach to virtualisation management
With all the news surrounding the virtualisation capabilities provided by Microsoft Windows Server 2008, it seems like a good time to take a look at the capabilities offered by competing environments.
Open-source suppliers have been including virtualisation
technologies in their Linux distributions for several years now, with
commercially supported offerings appearing in late 2006. These
offerings have reached a level of maturity and functionality, offering
features such live migration and resource control (the ability to
dynamically add and remove CPUs and memory to a virtual server). For
example, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform product supports
both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows guests. While
Windows guests need to be licensed according to Microsoft practices, an
unlimited number of Enterprise Linux guests can be hosted for no
additional charge.
So today's customer, finding that there is a growing selection of virtualisation products on the market, is faced with the decision of choosing the best solution for his or her needs. Perhaps the first realisation is that the future is going to be "multi-hypervisor", with different virtualisation technologies being used in different deployments, in exactly the same way that enterprise and SME customers have heterogeneous operating-system environments. And, undoubtedly, Linux-based, open-source virtualisation will be appropriate for many environments.
Given a multi-hypervisor future, it becomes necessary to take a rather more global view of the impact of virtualisation on a modern IT infrastructure. At the top of the list of concerns, as customers will quickly appreciate, will be virtualisation management and deployment flexibility.
