The other side of a virtual world

The other side of a virtual world

Basant Rajan, CTO, Symantec India, unfolds some challenges in the world of virtualisation

Friday, November 02, 2007

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Virtual machines have virtually engulfed the world around us, be it the hype and excitement with which they arrived, the cost and efficiency deliverables they have churned out or the many wrinkles of physical machines that they have smoothly ironed out. But while they continue to replace or complement the physical infrastructure in an organization, and solving the old-world problems, they are also generating a host of new problems that have started surfacing

Basant Rajan, CTO, Symantec India, unfolds some challenges like sprawl, migration, storage et cetera around virtualization in this interview with Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News.

CMN: Why is virtual sprawl emerging as a concern?

Basant Rajan: While there has been a lot of hype around virtualization, proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) as an added layer on physical machines (PMs), is a factor to reckon with. Increased adoption of virtualization is causing this sprawl, as there is a tendency to create as many VMs since they do not have any physical cost. But there are intangible costs like lifecycle management, patching, tracking etc that have to be still dealt with. While VMs offer powerful capabilities to enterprises, they exacerbate the challenge of data center complexity. In addition to managing physical servers from multiple hardware vendors running multiple operating systems, enterprises must now also manage multiple VM platform choices running on each operating system.

CMN: What are the problems that envelope VMs vis-à-vis PMs? Can you touch upon the main issues that are serious enough on the ground?

BR: There are many issues to address when it comes to VMs. One of them is managing the lifecycle of a VM. After being created, a VM has to migrate across servers depending upon the load and then have to be taken care of for termination and back-up as well. Migration is not an issue when it comes to physical machines. On the other hand, there are some issues like availability, disaster recovery and provisioning for storage that are equally applicable to both PMs and VMs. Also, migration necessitates mobile storage connectivity.

Another problem - Unlike a PM which when inactive, can be wrapped up and kept away in cold storage, a VM cannot be moth balled and forgotten.

CMN: Weren't these problems anticipated and taken into account while virtualization as a technology was being developed?

BR: No, because, everyone naturally saw the good side of the technology which is inarguably strong. Virtualization has definitely led to efficiency improvements. It is in fact, the increased adoption per se that has led to the problems. It is the same case as of growth of mobiles, the technology is nice, but increased and ubiquitous adoption leads to network jams. The success is engendering this new class of problems because they were not anticipated. Now we have to deal with them because the benefits of virtualization are worth in spite of the sprawl.

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