Hello my IT partners,
Virtual machines are a fact of IT in large organizations and even medium ones.
The saving in hardware is obvious and appealing.
Let us assume a single physical machine that provide all different servers in one organization.
This a single huge resource.
Is this resource managed in the most optimized way?
I would guess that in your organization, if a project needs a server, they calculate the size of memory, storage, CPU etc. Then hand it to the Virtual machine team as specifications and after a few hours the project can start working. These virtual resource assignment is fixed.
The point I want to make: These specifications are the same as you would do with physical machines, 5 years ago. The only difference is that you do not plug a real machine.
What about this parameters:
I prefer to compare to human assignment because a human is flexible to perform various tasks while a manufacturing machine is limited to a set of activities.
So, I think that a new expertise is emerging: virtual machine resource optimization.
Do I see any volunteers?
Think about it and let me know,
Noam
Virtual machines are a fact of IT in large organizations and even medium ones.
The saving in hardware is obvious and appealing.
Let us assume a single physical machine that provide all different servers in one organization.
This a single huge resource.
Is this resource managed in the most optimized way?
I would guess that in your organization, if a project needs a server, they calculate the size of memory, storage, CPU etc. Then hand it to the Virtual machine team as specifications and after a few hours the project can start working. These virtual resource assignment is fixed.
The point I want to make: These specifications are the same as you would do with physical machines, 5 years ago. The only difference is that you do not plug a real machine.
What about this parameters:
- Hours of activity - a lot of these virtual machines are for development and testing. They are not active at night or even more than 10 hours a day.
- Expected max/min usage time slots. Mainly in production environments you could identify patterns of pick activity.
- Setup time of a new virtual machine
I prefer to compare to human assignment because a human is flexible to perform various tasks while a manufacturing machine is limited to a set of activities.
So, I think that a new expertise is emerging: virtual machine resource optimization.
Do I see any volunteers?
Think about it and let me know,
Noam
With the IT trend moving towards virtualizaton, more than just deploying a VM environment, it is extremely important to understand what needs to be done to sustain the environment.
Obviously, with virtualization, every company would be looking into reducing the TCO on operations.. less hardware, less resources to manage the environments...
To achieve this it is important that the environments to be virtualized needs to be analysed to its fullest extent,ie, is the application deployed on the server a broadcaster or a receiver in terms of network, is the application deployed on the physical server having high paging and swapping, etc...
Hence a lot of thought needs to be put in designing the environment, before even implementation. Having said that, I still don't believe it is a new expertise emerging. Consider if the virtual concept was never introduced, the system administrator should be responsible to analyse the systems and understand how the application behave in the allocated environment.
You must have already realized that we are working on a virtualization and consolidation project. The biggest challenge is the gap between the application and infrastructure team.
This is the gap that needs to be narrowed in order to achieve an IT environment that is rigid.
The question would be how long would it take to bridge this gap??
Sajith Soman