Last week we had one of our sharp young Solution Architects, Pierre Seguin, attend a discussion on virtualization. At SpotOn we're actively thinking about the management of Cognos BI in virtual-type deployments. Pierre has kindly shared his notes and thoughts from the discussion:
Virtualization has been around for a long time but as of late it has absolutely exploded. With good hardware support, software support, and the need for organizations to consolidate their server assets, this wave of virtualization seems to be here to stay for a while. On this note I attended The Cutting Edge on Virtualization panel discussion hosted by The Ottawa Network on Wednesday. The panel consisted of Mike Kemp, CTO of Liquid Computing, Jean-Marc Seguin, Chief Architect of Embotics, and the founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay. I wasn't sure what to expect but it turned out that the talk was pretty interesting. Here's my take on the events of the day.
They started out by outlining the state of the art in virtualization. The consensus seemed to be that when it comes to individual virtual machines the tools and hardware are there to support them in the main stream (and in fact all large organizations are currently doing this). Xen, VMWare, Intel VT-x, Itanium based virtualization, Solaris virtualization stack, the list goes on. The basic virtualization hardware and software is there and mature. The big problem today is the management of large virtualized environments. Bringing machines up, putting them down, moving them to different hardware, monitoring them, etc. This is all done by either a restrictive framework (ex. Solaris virtualization stack) or in most cases a completely different hodgepodge of tools at each organization. At some point in the future a large corporation (cough IBM) will inevitably come in and introduce open standards to support virtualized environment management. In the mean time we make due. The consensus is that this is some years off. Current work in virtualization (of which Liquid Computing and Embotics are heavily involved in) is concentrated on making management tools that can be used to describe, deploy and monitor virtualized environments on the fly. This is to say nothing about doing the same for application tier components that exist in the virtualized space.
The other aspect that was talked about was how virtualization is used in the dev/QA environment. The founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay, was one of the panel members. His company does custom development for many different clients. Sound familiar? Have you ever had a client come back 6 months after you've completed a project and ask for new features? You're thinking ‘Great!' so you start to get to work only to find out your development and testing environments for the project have been cannibalized by other, more current projects. So, you go back to square one and set up the test environment from scratch just to get to the work they want you to do. It's all very tedious. To solve this problem his company has leveraged virtualization. His virtualization system consists of 55 virtual machines of which any 15 can be running simultaneously. So when a customer needs a new feature or bug fix they simply load the virtual machine associated with the project and bang! They're off to the races. We have had some good talks internally and are unanimous that this is a great fit for us too. This has become pretty standard in the industry and it's time we get on board.
All in all a very interesting field where opportunities seem to exist around every corner. Either internally for dev/QA streamlining or externally for creating the plethora of tools that will be needed to bring virtualization to the next level within the enterprise. We'll have to see where it takes us.
Pierre