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7/29/2019 Future of Virtualization IDC
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/future-of-virtualization-idc 1/21
Filing Information: April 2008, IDC #211938, Volume: 1
Enterprise Virtualization Software: Industry Developments and Models
I N D U S T R Y D E V E L O P M E N T S A N D M O D E L S
T h e F u t u r e o f V i r t u a l i z a t i o n : L e v e r a g i n g M o b i l i t y t o M o v eB e y o n d C o n s o l i d a t i o n
John Humphreys
I D C O P I N I O N
The server virtualization marketplace has been evolving rapidly over the past few
years and IDC has seen customer attitudes and stances toward virtualization mature
rapidly as well. As customers gain familiarity with the technology and as the
technology matures, organizations are leveraging virtualization to solve far more than
their server consolidation challenges. Increasingly, end users are using virtualization
to solve for disaster recovery, high availability, remote client and, ultimately,
managing the delivery of business applications to end users. These new emerging
use cases are the focus of this study and are predicated on the three key attributes of virtualization software, which include:
! Application isolation. The ability for applications to be encapsulated in
individual virtual machines and isolated from other applications residing on the
same host. This helps to maintain one "server," one app paradigm while still
utilizing the hardware and helps avoid all the application regression testing that
must occur in a shared OS environment. The application isolation attribute is
leveraged both in consolidating servers and in consolidating desktops onto
servers running in the datacenter (so called vdi).
! Virtual machines are files. As such virtual machines can be copied, backed-up,
replicated and moved like files. This in turn enables unique, easier, lower-costbusiness continuity practices and, as a result, allows customers to protect a
greater percentage of assets and thus limit the cost of downtime and lost
revenue associated with IT outages.
! Live migration. The ability to move a live running application from one host to
another enables virtual machines to move without any application downtime.
Today, the capability is largely used as a tool to address planned downtime, and
increasingly for capacity planning and load balancing across a pool of server
resources. Longer term, by pairing live migration with application monitoring
technology, customers will be able to manage the quality of service for entire
business services, whether those services are delivered via an SOA or a
traditional three-tiered architecture.
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©2008 IDC #211938 1
I N T H I S S T U D Y
This IDC study provides data on how virtualization is being leveraged within the
market today as well as data and IDC's opinions on how is currently evolving, the new
use cases being deployed, and a longer term view on how SOA and virtualization
could come together to help move the concept of cloud computing closer to becoming
a reality.
S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W
A lot has been written in recent years on virtualization and how it is changing IT. At
the highest level, virtualization technologies deliver on the key attributes of
encapsulation and mobility. For the most part, the industry and customers have been
focused on the encapsulation benefits and the cost reductions those benefits provide.
Going forward, IDC believes that, while there are still some use cases rooted in the
encapsulation attributes, the majority of new reasons to employ virtualization in the
infrastructure will be associated with the mobility of virtual machines.
While this study is primarily focused on the role of virtualization technologies in
implementing these new use cases, it does require firm grounding in the state of the
market today and the drivers behind the first wave of virtualization adoption.
As IDC has found over the last few years, virtualization technologies are largely
considered to be mainstream by customers. Recent surveys found that over 50% of
all customers are employing virtualization in support of production applications,
including components of some of the most mission-critical applications such as
supply chain management and enterprise resource planning. In fact, of those
employing virtualization in their organizations, on average they report that roughly one
quarter of their production applications are running on virtual machines. Within the
next 12 months, these same users expect nearly 50% of their applications will be
hosted on a virtualized server.
This phenomenon is driving companies to reconsider best practices when deploying
new applications, and a growing number of end users report that unless there is an
economic or technical reason, their stance is to deploy all new applications as a
virtual machine. This reversal in best practice is one of the indicators that IDC
believes, foreshadows the expanded role virtualization may have in addressing a host
of IT management and process challenges.
D r i v e r s o f V i r t u a l i z a t i o n 1 . 0
As has been well documented, the market for virtualization emerged out of the
downturn in IT spending following the bursting of the Internet bubble. At that time,
because organizations had been expanding their IT infrastructures so rapidly and
considering long-term consequences, a period of rationalization and consolidation
was extremely ripe. Companies that were consolidating whole datacenters found that
the number of servers under management in their IT shops had exploded — and it
was not uncommon for organizations that had hundreds of servers under
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management to now find that they were managing multiple thousands of devices and
that the IT build out and a trend toward decentralized IT amplified each other.
Rolling this up to a market level, IDC has found that by 2010, if these trends continue
unabated, there will be approximately 41 million servers installed in customer sites
worldwide. This marks a 700% increase over the 15-year period from 1996 to 2010.
At the same time, the drivers for this explosion made tremendous sense when looking
at each investment from a tactical standpoint. The first driver for this explosion in
systems is the rapid expansion in applications that IT needs to host. Today, there is
nary a business process or project that is somehow supported by IT and one, two or
even a half a dozen servers. At the same time, the mandate has been to take out as
much cost as possible so each new project is scrutinized to see if it would support an
IT investment. This directly led, in combination with new technologies emerging into
the market, to buyers gravitating toward lower cost systems based on the x86
processor. These systems were and continue to be priced at orders of magnitudes
lower than the more centralized high-end systems favored 20 or more years ago.
The gravitation toward low-end x86 servers has gotten to the point whereapproximately 90% of all systems sold are today based on chips from Intel and AMD.
This sort of sea change was also made possible by the wholesale support of the
Windows operating system for a majority of applications that businesses need to run.
The downside of Windows applications is that historically running more than one
application on the OS has led to conflicts in the resource or DLL, which in turn has led
to system instability. Rather than spend significant time, effort, and energy testing and
regressing applications so they would work well in a shared OS environment, the best
practice becomes to only deploy one application per server.
The result of this one application per system paradigm has been a tremendous
underutilization of server resources. IDC estimates that, on average, less then 10% of the total server capacity is utilized over a period of weeks or months. Again, taking
this to a market level, this means that today there is roughly $140 billion of server
capacity sitting idle in the marketplace. This is equivalent to roughly a three-year
supply.
The encapsulation benefits of virtualization software enabled customers to harness
the growing power of x86 servers and put a greater percentage of the capacity they
purchased to productive use. At the same time, by running on an isolated OS, this
allowed them to do so without having to do the expensive regression and testing they
would have incurred in a shared OS deployment.
Customers also found that by reducing the number of servers, they also saved interms of power and cooling costs as well as real estate expenses associated with
maintaining enough datacenter space to house these systems. To put some metrics
to this, customers report on average cutting their facilities' costs by about 20% post
virtualization. This holds the potential to return huge amounts of capital to the
customers as IDC has found that, in aggregate, customers spend $29 billion annually
in powering and cooling their servers. Additionally, we have worked with others that,
through virtualization, have been able to extend the life of the facility — taking
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©2008 IDC #211938 3
advantage of the time value of money and pushing out the multimillion dollar capital
outlay associated with building a new datacenter.
Finally, in this first phase of virtualization adoption we are seeing that the technology
has the potential to significantly alter operating cost structure for managing IT. IDC
has found that in the "physical world" on average, most organizations employ one IT
professional for every 20–30 servers installed in the datacenter. In the virtual world,
discussions with early adopters has found that the same IT professional can manage
60–80 virtual machines — with some customers reporting ratios of up to 200 to 1.
Being able to address the operational costs, which drive between 70–80% of total
company spending in the realm of IT, is one of the tremendous opportunities for
virtualization technologies to change the economics of IT. The other major opportunity
is centered on mitigating lost revenue attributable to system downtime. This
component of the future of virtualization will be the main thrust of this report.
F U T U R E O U T L O O K
T h e F u t u r e o f V i r t u a l i z a t i o n : S o m e F o r k s i n
t h e R o a d
As it was stated previously, the two key attributes of virtualization are, at the highest
level: encapsulation and mobility. To date, the thrust of adoption has been on
leveraging the encapsulation benefits and we have seen virtualization first deployed
in test and development scenarios (including developer workstations), then in the
migration of unsupported NT4 applications, and finally into new applications being
deployed in production.
In this manner there is a well-defined path going forward. The industry has found a
very compelling and powerful "hammer" and now it can go out and look for "nails."
One area that has garnered much attention in the need for consolidation is the
desktop computer. Utilization of desktops is even lower than servers and the
environment is even more distributed — driving even bigger support costs and
management headaches. Finally, the power cost savings or "green" benefits of
consolidation of desktops could dwarf that of servers given that IDC estimates that
there are roughly 500 million corporate PCs deployed around the globe today.
A few years ago, a few enterprising customers began levering virtualization for just
such an exercise. They paired virtualization together with Microsoft's Remote Desktop
Protocol (RDP) to create a hosted desktop solution (see Figure 1).
Today, hosted desktops or "vdi" as it is becoming known, is clearly the next step for the consolidation of IT infrastructure. That said, there are still some hurdles that must
be overcome — first and foremost is the economics of vdi. These solutions still run at
a price premium relative to traditional distributed desktops. The two main "culprits"
are storage costs and operating system expenses
From a storage perspective, the price difference between locally deployed 40–80GB
hard drive and the same volume of space on a SAN is significant; hence, a driver of
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why customers are also looking at lower cost network storage options such as iSCSI
or NAS when considering moving to hosted desktops. Additionally, by consolidating
the local hard drive data onto networked storage, customers also have the ability to
consolidate multiple copies of applications and operating systems that are typically
replicated locally. IDC estimates that 15–20% of most local hard drives is space
dedicated to OS and application copies. Given these centralized streaming or
dynamic network boot capabilities along with the strides being made in lowering cost
per gigabyte, IDC does believe that storage costs for client consolidation will
eventually no longer be an economic challenge.
The other major cost hurdle is with operating systems. Today, to legally deploy a
virtual Windows desktop a customer must either be a software assurance customer or
(delete) and purchase a special license that Microsoft terms VECD or it must
purchase a retail copy of Windows. As a lot of early adopters are either not software
assurance customers or have had difficulty navigating the VECD licensing terms; they
have opted for the retail approach. This has the effect of adding approximately $300
to each vdi seat a customer deploys, which in turn has priced vdi solutions above that
of traditional desktops (somewhere around 20–30% higher).
As a result, the solution has remained a niche play and customers that are deploying
solutions are doing so for primarily compliance or data security reasons. Secondary
drivers of purchasing include end-user productivity gained through increased uptime
as well as better desktop management processes for hosted desktop solutions.
Another hurdle that vdi will need to overcome if it is to be as broadly adopted as
server virtualization is the performance issue. Unlike server virtualization where
performance impacts are negligible for the majority of applications, desktop
virtualization is reliant upon a remote graphics protocol to deliver the user interface to
the screen in front of the user. Today the most commonly deployed remote graphics
protocols are Microsoft's RDP and Citirx's ICA and while much better than just a few
years ago, the performance does lag that of a local system, especially when trying to
using graphics-intensive applications.
Again, as with storage, much is being done in the industry to mitigate the
performance issue. Thin client vendors have begun to embed graphics chips for local
rendering in the point-of-presence devices. Microsoft, in addition to the improvements
coming in RDP v6, recently purchased Calista to handle graphics virtualization on the
server. In addition to these incremental approaches to remote graphics improvement,
there are a host of net new activities to improve performance. These include work in
kernel-based virtualization by Quamranet to drive, among other things, a new protocol
it terms SPICE — Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments. There
is also work being done by an industry consortium called Net2Display being run out of
Columbia University as well as some other protocol developments from the likes of
nComputing and others.
And while this does seem like plumbing and not as sexy as policy-based
management or service-oriented architectures, because it is so critical to the
successful enablement of vdi, a fast, efficient, simple, and hardware-independent
approach does seem like a major gating factor in adoption and hence a valuable
piece of the solution.
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Finally, in the realm of challenges to vdi adoption are desktop trends and cultural
resistance to change. Currently, vdi solutions are applicable only to those with
desktop systems as a user must be connected to get access. Too much of the
average laptop users' needs require off line access — which today is not handled
elegantly at all. From a total available market perspective this reduces the TAM from
roughly 500 million systems to 350 million — but the trend toward deploying more
laptops will likely reduce this further with every refresh cycle. IDC also believes there
will be a challenge getting workers to overcome the "my PC" and concerns about
monitoring the activity of workers running on vdi. These challenges are likely to linger
much longer then the hurdles associated with the economics and performance of the
solution — but if the costs don't at least reach parity with that of traditional desktops
or the performance lags that of a local solution, these cultural concerns will be mute.
Beyond servers and clients, there are a host of different areas companies are looking
to enable with the isolation benefits of virtualization. These run the gamut from
network applications that can now be scaled virtually instead of through hardware-
based appliances through to consumer plays in smartphones, set-top boxes, gaming
and even televisions. Most of these are looking to virtualization as a means to reduce
bill of materials costs and increase product margins.
F I G U R E 1
B e y o n d S e r v e r C o n s o l i d a t i o n
Virtualization for Server
Consolidation
# Server consolidation# Extend the datacenter life# Go “Green”
Virtualization for Client
Consolidation
#“Oh I could’ve had a V8”# Virtual clients# Go “Green”
$-
$500
$1,000
$1,500
$2,000
$2,500
$3,000
$3,500
$4,000
$4,500
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
R
e v e n u e ( $ M )
Desktop virtualization Application virtualization
Presentation virtualization
Server HostedVirtual Desktops (vdi)
RemoteInteraction
D a
t a c e n
t e
r
E x e c u t i o n
S t o r a g eIP
NetworkIP
Network
Unique Client OSs
Virtualization for Server
Consolidation
# Server consolidation# Extend the datacenter life# Go “Green”
Virtualization for Client
Consolidation
#“Oh I could’ve had a V8”# Virtual clients# Go “Green”
$-
$500
$1,000
$1,500
$2,000
$2,500
$3,000
$3,500
$4,000
$4,500
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
R
e v e n u e ( $ M )
Desktop virtualization Application virtualization
Presentation virtualization
$-
$500
$1,000
$1,500
$2,000
$2,500
$3,000
$3,500
$4,000
$4,500
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
R
e v e n u e ( $ M )
Desktop virtualization Application virtualization
Presentation virtualization
Server HostedVirtual Desktops (vdi)
RemoteInteraction
D a
t a c e n
t e
r
E x e c u t i o n
E x e c u t i o n
S t o r a g e
S t o r a g eIP
NetworkIP
Network
Unique Client OSs
Source: IDC, 2008
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The Other Fork: Virtual Machine Mobility
In addition to the consolidation benefits of virtualization, there appears to be a whole
host of new use cases based on the mobility of virtual machines. In aggregate, these
use cases are generally focused on reducing downtime and increasing the agility of
IT. These include how virtualization can help customers avoid planned downtime,
protect a greater percentage of their IT assets in case of disaster, reduce unplanneddowntime due to hardware and eventually application and OS failures, and ultimately
help to deliver on the concept of service-oriented computing.
In terms of virtual machine mobility, there are essentially two means in which a VM
becomes "mobile." First, virtualization software has the effect of decoupling the
application stack from the underlying hardware. It does so by essentially turning a
server into a file. As such a VM can now be copied, backed-up, replicated, and
moved like a file. This in turn opens the door to bring low-cost business continuity to
the rest of the IT environment.
In addition to turning servers into files, a growing number of the virtualization software
providers have the ability to do live migrations — moving a live running VM with OSand application from one host to another without any downtime. Today, this capability
is being used to address planned downtime needs and IT professional "quality of life"
issues such as doing hardware swaps or upgrades during normal business hours
without having to take down the application. Going forward, the technology can be
leveraged to created pools of computing capacity against which applications can be
run and further out, as a technology that enables SOA and true "cloud computing."
Business Continuity: Driv ing Interest
Increasingly, customers are beginning to recognize that IT is no longer a series of
unrelated systems each providing a discrete business function or application. Rather,
IT itself has increasing become one whole interconnected "system" and like
interconnected infrastructure systems such as communication or energy delivery, the
failure of one piece can and typically does have a cascading impact on the whole.
As one customer recently said:
[In a] traditional [DR model] you buy a cold or warm spare and you stick it at the
other datacenter where it gathers dust because the odds of it being used are very
low and you forget to update it. It has old firmware, old drivers, or may have been
'acquired' for use elsewhere. And then when you have to use it, all hell breaks
loose.
As a result, IDC finds that partners, the government and even internally through
SLAs, business units are requiring more disaster-tolerant and generally available ITsolutions. For IT to protect the "great unprotected masses" without dramatically
increasing the budget will require innovators to apply new technology in a different
way to satisfy both uptime and budgetary pressures. The trajectory of adoption for
business continuity is illustrated in Figure 2.
All of this indicates, in the words of Clayton Christiansen, generally business
continuity is an "underserved job." By undershot Dr Christiansen and others at
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©2008 IDC #211938 7
Innosight describe a job or process that "is important to customers and have yet to be
addressed appropriately."
IDC believes virtualization is a technology that is extremely well positioned to benefit
from this awakening. In a recent worldwide survey of approximately 400 customers,
business continuity (BC) ranked second behind consolidation as the reason they are
implementing virtualization (multiple responses allowed). Interestingly in emerging
markets, customers were more likely to be using virtualization software to drive BC
then for consolidation. Additionally, the midmarket (100–1,000 employees) was as
likely to use virtualization software for BC as consolidation (see Figure 3).
As an example of this, Gannett Publishing has taken very effective use of this
capability. The company implemented virtualization across both its primary as well as
subsidiary sites. As a result, the company has had two key benefits. First, the
company was able to consolidate DR services into its two primary datacenters.
Instead of having to maintain a third site to act as a cold backup, they now use each
primary site as a backup to each other.
Additionally, they have been able to offer DR as a service to its subsidiaries. This wasput to dramatic use by some local and regional papers in Louisiana when hurricane
Katrina hit in 2005. As the story approached, because the VMs and data had been
replicated offsite, Gannett was able to migrate services for these properties to the
Washington DC area and once the storm had passed and the local infrastructure was
back up and running, the company migrated applications back to the primary sites —
all without any loss of service.
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F I G U R E 2
B u s i n e s s C o n t i n u i t y : L e v e r a g i n g V i r t u a l M a c h i n e F i l e s
Virtualization for DR
# Disaster recovery
Virtualization for Application
Availability# Alternative to clustering# Unplanned downtime# VM/OS/application awareness
Virtualization for InfrastructureAvailability# Auto restart of VMs
– Based on HV or hardware failures
S e r v
i c e
l e v e
l
a u
t o m a
t i o n
H i g h a v a
i l a b i l i t y
M a
i n t e n a n c e
C a p a c
i t y p
l a n n
i n g
D i s a s
t e r r e c o v e r y
Capability
Priority
Value“Readiness” Map
Virt. License Revenue
-
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Consolidation File mobility Live migration
Virtualization for DR
# Disaster recovery
Virtualization for Application
Availability# Alternative to clustering# Unplanned downtime# VM/OS/application awareness
Virtualization for InfrastructureAvailability# Auto restart of VMs
– Based on HV or hardware failures
Virtualization for DR
# Disaster recovery
Virtualization for Application
Availability# Alternative to clustering# Unplanned downtime# VM/OS/application awareness
Virtualization for InfrastructureAvailability# Auto restart of VMs
– Based on HV or hardware failures
S e r v
i c e
l e v e
l
a u
t o m a
t i o n
H i g h a v a
i l a b i l i t y
M a
i n t e n a n c e
C a p a c
i t y p
l a n n
i n g
D i s a s
t e r r e c o v e r y
Capability
Priority
Value“Readiness” Map
S e r v
i c e
l e v e
l
a u
t o m a
t i o n
H i g h a v a
i l a b i l i t y
M a
i n t e n a n c e
C a p a c
i t y p
l a n n
i n g
D i s a s
t e r r e c o v e r y
Capability
Priority
Value“Readiness” Map
Virt. License Revenue
-
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Consolidation File mobility Live migration
Source: IDC, 2008
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F I G U R E 3
A V a r i e t y o f D r i v e r s : B u s i n e s s C o n t i n u i t y b y M a r k e t s an d
C o m p a n y S i z e
Percent of Respondents Ranking Capability Very Important
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
Test and dev. Server
consolidation
Business
continuity
Resource
pooling
VDI Mainframe
migration
Midsize Enterprise
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Test and dev. Consolidation Businesscontinuity
Resourcepooling
VDI Mainframemigration
Developed markets Emerging markets
Companies under 1,000 employees are as likelyto employ virtualization for business continuityas consolidation
Organizations in emerging markets are morelikely to employ virtualization for businesscontinuity then consolidation
Percent of Respondents Ranking Capability Very Important
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
Test and dev. Server
consolidation
Business
continuity
Resource
pooling
VDI Mainframe
migration
Midsize Enterprise
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Test and dev. Consolidation Businesscontinuity
Resourcepooling
VDI Mainframemigration
Developed markets Emerging markets
Companies under 1,000 employees are as likelyto employ virtualization for business continuityas consolidation
Organizations in emerging markets are morelikely to employ virtualization for businesscontinuity then consolidation
Source: IDC's Virtualization Tracker Survey , 2007–2008
Beyond DR: High Avai labi l i ty for the Masses
The other area virtualization may help change the calculus of IT is in minimizing the
revenue lost because of system downtime. Said another way, virtualization may be
able to drive new revenue by making applications more highly available.
An IDC study from 2003 found that 44% of the nearly 1,400 customers protected
through clustering less than 10% of their server assets and on a weighted average
basis, this U.S. study found that on average companies were protecting roughly 19%
of their servers with clustering technology.
Most of those participants found tremendous value in clustering for availability but
they also cited ease of use as the driving reason they weren't protecting more of their
servers. Top reasons include difficulty in setting up, configuring, and maintaining
clustered servers, application compatibility, and finding the people with the right skill
sets (see Figure 4).
As a result, most customers protect only the most mission-critical applications against
both disasters as well as less widespread outages.
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To understand the cost of downtime implications of this approach at a market level,
IDC has created a model that distributes the installed base of servers across a range
of availability levels. These levels include: AL0 — which is essentially an unprotected
system, AL1 — which employs technologies like RAID or application logging to
ensure data availability, AL3 — which can be thought of as a traditional cluster for
both data and application availability, and AL4 — which is a fault-tolerant system.
Based on data from the clustering study and from IDC storage group, we believe
about 35% of all installed systems can be classified as AL0; 55% as AL1; 8% as AL3
and the remaining systems as AL4. Applying uptime estimates that range from 99%
for AL0 systems to 99.999% for systems classified as AL4 and combining that with
estimates of planned versus unplanned downtime share and hourly downtime costs
which was gathered from a 2001 study by Contingency Planning Research, which is a
Division of Eagle Rock Alliance, IDC estimates that server downtime cost
organizations roughly $140 billion in lost worker productivity and revenue in 2007.
The vast majority of these losses (over 75%) are estimated to come from minimally or
unprotected systems — which are largely thought of as "low strategic value." The cost
of downtime to organizations has been trending up in recent years as the footprint of
IT grows and as individual systems become interconnected and the IT infrastructure
of a company increasingly becomes one big system. As a result, the impact of
downtime is expected to only increase in subsequent years. IDC estimates that at the
current pace of growth, downtime will cost organizations worldwide over $220 billion
by 2011 (see Figure 5).
Intuitively, these estimates makes sense as it is roughly the same size as the cost of
managing and administrating IT and organizations are constantly having to balance
minimizing downtime costs with labor and technology expenses. While it is certainly
possible to drive downtime to zero the cost to do so would be tremendous and grossly
outweigh the value to the organization.
This use case in terms of near to midterm opportunities for virtualization, is leveraging
the technology to bring high availability to the masses. As was stated previously, the
vast majority of applications are not deployed in a HA environment because to date
solutions such as clustering have been perceived as complex, hard to set up, and
difficult to manage.
To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an
automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. In
these scenarios, a host failure triggers the rebooting of the VM on other virtualized
hosts in the datacenter.
While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with
unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and
hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level
awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market
are "blind from the waist up." That is, they do not know what is happening inside the
virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped
working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering
application services most care to know.
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One issue hampering the delivery of application-level HA is that there needs to be
application knowledge, which in turn means being able to collect data from every
application in a company's portfolio. Building the connectors to provide this level of
awareness is a daunting task. That said, there is a lot of work going on today to close
this awareness gap while getting around the need to have application knowledge for
the entire portfolio. Notably, Marathon Technologies has announced a solution to
provide system fault tolerance to virtualization. Its solution, which can also deliver
basic host-level restarts and component-level fault tolerance, relies on a virtual
appliance that sits on the hypervisor and essentially recreates a clustered physical
environment in the virtual world. This appliance inspects I/O traffic coming through the
hypervisor and if it notices an absence of activity can take action (i.e., restart all the
VMs on a host, switch over to a hot standby, switch over to a full lock stepped virtual
machine).
IDC, however, believes there is an additional opportunity between maintaining a hot
standby and automatic restarts at the host level. By inspecting traffic through the
hypervisor, virtual machine Managers have the ability to tell if a specific VM is active
or not and by assuming that a lack of activity for a certain period of time equates to a
fault in the VM, that specific VM can be restarted — either on the same host or a new
one. What this solution lacks in elegance it makes up for in applicability. Because it is
not reliant on detailed application or even OS information, it can be widely
implemented — something that is critical if trying to bring HA to the vast majority of
systems that currently go unprotected.
F I G U R E 4
C h a l l e n g e s t o C l u s t e r i n g : E a s e o f U s e
Data migration
Training/learning period
Budget constraints
Application compatibility
Support not available
Lack of qualified IT staff
Too difficult to manage
Configurations
Getting it operationalNo problems
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Set-up Compati-bility
Mainte-nance
Cost/value
Noproblems
Skills
(%)
Data migration
Training/learning period
Budget constraints
Application compatibility
Support not available
Lack of qualified IT staff
Too difficult to manage
Configurations
Getting it operationalNo problems
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Set-up Compati-bility
Mainte-nance
Cost/value
Noproblems
Skills
(%)
Source: IDC, 2008
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F I G U R E 5
C o s t o f D o w n t i m e , 2 0 0 2 – 2 0 1 1
Cost of downtime
Mgmt. spendingCombined P&C
Server spending
0
100
200
300
400
500
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Installed BaseUnits (M)(US$B)
Capex
Opex
Lostrevenue
Cost of downtime
Mgmt. spendingCombined P&C
Server spending
0
100
200
300
400
500
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Installed BaseUnits (M)(US$B)
Capex
Opex
Lostrevenue
Capex
Opex
Lostrevenue
Source: IDC, 2008
VM Mobility: Live Migration
Recapping where the industry is today with respect to leveraging virtual machine
mobility, IDC sees two primary use cases gaining acceptance from customers. The
first, leveraging virtualization as a tool to reduce or eliminate planned downtime takes
advantage of the live migration capabilities. The other use case is disaster recovery
and here customers are taking advantage that with virtualization servers are
expressed as files and these files can be copied, replicated, moved, and snapshot
like any other file.
The attitude of customers is shifting toward mobility as well. In 2005, when IDC
surveyed virtualization customers about their motivations for deploying the technology
in their organizations, only about 5% of the responses involved use cases that
required mobility. When IDC repeated that survey 12 months later, the percentage
that wanted to leverage the mobility aspects of the technology ballooned to
approximately 21% of those surveyed. The use of live migration with customers has
corresponded to the rise in these new use cases. In 2005, just over 25% of those
surveyed reported using the technology. This rose to nearly 45% in 2006 and over
60% in 2007.
Going forward, mobility is seen as a defining feature that will enable the technology to
move beyond just a tool for consolidation. From that perspective IDC believes there
are two emerging use cases on the adoption horizon: virtualization as a tool for
capacity planning and as a solution in delivering service-oriented computing (see
Figure 6). Both of these use cases leverage the live migration capabilities in
combination with insights into the health or utilization of the hardware and application
layers, respectively.
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Essentially, these use cases are the same from a virtualization technology level,
rather it's how far up the stack instrumentation occurs that provides the unique
difference. In the capacity planning use case, rather than trying to estimate server
capacity at the host level, users can treat multiple hosts as a single pool of resources
and VM loads can be balanced across the pool based on levels of utilizations of
processor, memory, and I/O as well as policies set up by the user. These rules could
pertain to individual VM requirements and host-level utilizations — both from a
maximum and minimum perspective. Users are also able to apply affinity and anti-
affinity rules to guarantee that, in the case of affinity rules, two or more VMs are
always hosted on the same machine and with anti-affinity rules, the two or more VMs
never reside on the same machine (two DNS servers for instance).
Companies such as Natixis Capital Markets have already begun deploying such
architectures and have reported great success with over 4,000 individual moves
without incident over roughly a six-month period.
This approach to capacity planning means that IT architects and capacity planners
are freed up from having to "forecast" or guess at the capacity needs of any given
application they deploy, which in turn will likely result in less of the dramatic over-
provisioning of resources that has gone on historically. Rather, they can plan at the
resource pool level, which, because of the diversification of load, makes forecasting
capacity needs much easier and more straightforward. Also, instead of purchasing
excess capacity "insurance" in the form of additional servers for each application,
they can overprovision at the pool level, knowing that at any given moment in time a
few of the applications may be experiencing demand spikes, but it would not likely
extend to all applications in the company's portfolio.
Conceptually, the idea is very appealing for those that have ever struggled with
planning for the rollout of a new application, but in practice there are still some
hurdles that must be overcome if the concept will have broad market adoption. First
and foremost is that, today, live migrations cannot cross subnet boundaries. This
means to benefit from the economy of scales this technology would provide the host
should have access to all subnets in the pool. Effectively, this creates a situation in
which the customer is giving up network security through isolation for flexibility.
To address these concerns companies like Cisco with its Topspin acquisition, 3Leaf
Networks, Xsigo and others are working to bring I/O virtualization to the fore to deliver
both secure isolated networks and host pooling that allows migrations to occur across
larger and more diverse resource pools and applications.
While the capacity planning use case is intriguing from a technology perspective and
generally the capabilities exist to apply the concept today, the value to the customer
is of question. Unlike DR, load balancing across a pool of servers in an automated
way will likely feel risky for the vast majority of end users. The analogy would be
inventing the car that drives itself. The first users are likely to be risk takers and even
these folks will want to have their hands on or near the wheel. For some the reward
(reclaiming hours of their day) may be worth the risk, especially with successive
iterations of the technology — the same will be most likely be true with resource pools
and making capacity planning easier may simply not be enough of an incentive to
take the risk.
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F I G U R E 6
F u t u r e U s e C a s e s o f L i v e M i g r a t i o n
Virtualization for
Hardware Maintenance
#Planned downtime
Virtualization for Policy-
Based Automation# Service-oriented computing# IT in the “cloud”
Virtualization for
Capacity Planning
# Pool of resources# Balance load based on
–Hardware utilization –Application requirements
Use of Live Migration
Yes No
27%44%
73%
56%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
2005 2006
63%
37%
2007
Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012
Filemobility
42%
Livemigration
42%
Isolation
16%
Virtualization for
Hardware Maintenance
#Planned downtime
Virtualization for Policy-
Based Automation# Service-oriented computing# IT in the “cloud”
Virtualization for
Capacity Planning
# Pool of resources# Balance load based on
–Hardware utilization –Application requirements
Use of Live Migration
Yes No
27%44%
73%
56%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
2005 2006
63%
37%
2007
Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012Revenue Share, 2012
Filemobility
42%
Livemigration
42%
Isolation
16%
Filemobility
42%
Livemigration
42%File
mobility42%
Livemigration
42%
Isolation
16%
Source: IDC, 2008
Server Virtual izat ion and the Impact on SOA
This last phase in the application of live migration marks a long term and somewhat
speculative outlook on how the technology may develop to deliver what could be
termed service-centric computing.
The belief is that today both SOA and virtualization are powerful forces shaping the
future of IT. SOA is fundamentally rearchitecting how business applications are
delivered — moving from one of discrete applications to one of componentized
services. In the same manner, virtualization is changing the way in which
infrastructure is delivered — moving from static and hard wired to dynamic and
extremely flexible. IDC believes, by bringing together SOA and virtualization, the
industry has the opportunity to execute on that long-held vision in which IT
professionals can shift the delivery of infrastructure and applications over to
management systems that are linked to policies and service levels that are set by the
business.
The beginnings of this evolution can already be seen in how application services are
delivered. Historically, application servers incorporated a hierarchical application
stack that went from operating system, to Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to application
server software and finally to a series of applications hosted in containers. The upside
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was one software stack; the downside was the applications were not isolated from
each other and one failure in the stack could bring down multiple applications.
With virtualization, this architecture could be altered so that each application was
maintained in a virtual machine and each VM had an OS, JVM, and copy of app
server software. While this works wonders to deliver better isolation of applications, it
also has driven the creation of more images and software stacks to patch, update,
and manage.
More recently, BEA has introduced LiquidVM, Virtual Edition and Liquid Operations
Control. More recently, BEA has introduced the idea of an application server
appliance with the LiquidVM, Virtual Edition, and Liquid Operations Control. Here
instead of a separate OS, JVM and App server, the stack is combined into a tuned
and optimized appliance that supplies all these services. Customers can deploy their
applications right on top of this appliance and it greatly reduces the number of
software components IT has to manage.
This architecture is very similar to that of SOA as services are run in an environment
just as applications are run on an appliance. Clearly, the big leap will be indeconstructing applications into the base services and this will likely be more than a
five-year process, but whether truly componentized applications become a reality or
not, the combination of application environment sensing and the control infrastructure
control instantiated through virtualization is a powerful concept that could lead to IT
managing delivering services rather then focusing on managing infrastructure (see
Figure 7).
If the industry can devise a way to link applications to represent individual business
processes, the concept of service-oriented computing remains feasible as the
management of the infrastructure can be linked to monitoring of the application or
service environment and measured against policies and service levels set by the
users.
This really does represent a marriage of best-in-breed — application monitoring tools
provide detailed data on the health, performance and demand for a specific business
application or service while infrastructure management tools such as live migration
implement the moves, adds, and changes of individual VMs hosting the service.
This vision for policy-based automation of the scaling, moving, resizing, provisioning
and decommissioning of virtual machines in support of application service levels is
highly speculative and only roughly defined. Even more of a challenge is that for such
a vision to come to fruition would require unprecedented collaboration in the industry
and hence is why service-oriented computing while this scenario in the future of
virtualization still be years from broad market acceptance and likely look very differentonce all the vendor wrangling and positioning is complete.
That said, if a version of this concept actually makes it successfully to market, it is
only a small step from here to moving IT into the cloud. Here individual services hold
no special significance or proprietary value add for the customer. It is only through the
combination of these services that one is able to deliver a business application and
the unique advantage comes not from the individual services but from how they are
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This is enabling new models around disaster recovery, high availability as well as
combined with SOA, a means to deliver true service-oriented computing.
All that said it is important to keep in mind what virtualization technologies can do well
and where more work needs to be done.
The benefits of virtualization include:
! Great tool for server consolidation
! Helps reduce power and cooling costs
! Can change the server to admin ratio
! Consolidation works for more than just servers
! Imparts flexibility on the infrastructure and makes provisioning much faster
! Works well for hardware upgrades
! Homogenizes all the servers
! Enables BC for the "rest of the datacenter"
! Is creating whole new business models and value chains
! Lays the foundation for Policy Based Automation
Challenges that will need to be overcome include:
! Not for all applications — I/O-intensive apps still pay an overhead
! Doesn't consolidate images — change management still an issue!
! Speed is not a substitute for intelligence — customers can move too fast
! No application awareness — policy-based automation is not yet an option
! DR is reliant on app log shipping or replication software — better coordination
needed
! More cost-effective storage needed
! Creates more mission-critical servers
! Mobility impacts on security still poorly understood
! Network mobility is lagging behind
! IT, Business Unit and Executive Team buy-in is required
There certainly are many ways to employ this technology today and with continued
refined from the vendors as well as continued experimentation and creative thinking
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from customers, IDC believes the application of the virtualization to the problems
faced by IT is only now just beginning to be developed.
L E A R N M O R E
R e l a t e d R e s e a r c h
! IDC's Software Taxonomy, 2008 (IDC #210828, February 2008)
! Worldwide System Infrastructure Software 2008 Top 10 Predictions (IDC
#209633, December 2007)
! Worldwide and U.S. High-Availability Server 2007–2011 Forecast and Analysis
(IDC #210096, December 2007)
! Customer Requirements in the Server Virtualization Marketplace (IDC #209247,
November 2007)
! Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems 2007–2011 Forecast Update
(IDC #209282, November 2007)
! Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2006 Vendor Shares (IDC #208041 August
2007)
! Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2007–2011 Forecast (IDC #208015 August
2007)
! SAVVIS Leverages Virtualization to Reshape Managed Services (IDC #206270,
April 2007)
! Nationwide: Leveraging Policy-Based Automation in a Virtual Environment (IDC
#204953, January 2007)
! Virtualization: 10 Questions with QUALCOMM (IDC #203501, October 2006)
! VMware: Virtualization 3.0 (IDC #202061, June 2006)
! Virtualization and Change and Configuration Management Software (IDC
#202128, June 2006)
! Microsoft Acquires Softricity for Application Virtualization and Management (IDC
#201844, May 2006)
! Lowering the Barrier to Entry: VMware Offers Server Virtual Machine Product for
Free (IDC #34885, February 2006)
! IDC's Top 10 System Infrastructure Software Predictions for 2006 (IDC #34837,
February 2006)
! Success and Disruption: The Broader Impact of Open Source Software (IDC
#DR2006 _3CAG, February 2006)
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! Worldwide Virtual Environment Software 2002–2004 Competitive Market Final
View (IDC #34419, November 2005)
C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e
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