What is virtualization?
For more than a decade virtualization solutions have been maturing, to the point where they are now accepted as a core element of data center operations, and in fact form the foundation of the IaaS layer of cloud computing. This is largely the result of businesses being driven by the need to better utilize the enormous capital and maintenance expenses invested in computer hardware and communications infrastructure. A sector of information technology receiving a lot of attention is virtualization servers. The prime outcome of virtualization technology is to provide a logical division (partitioning) of available computer servers, within the physical computer hardware. This enables better management and utilization of the underlying hardware by applications. A benefit of virtualization is operating X _Virtual Machine_s (VM) over Y physical machines and allocating resources independently of the physical make up of the hardware. This concept has been around for decades offered by mainframes and UNIX machines. The use of commodity priced PC hardware and open source middleware software makes the overall costs of assembling large quantities of computing resources reasonable and scalable.
Virtualization solutions concentrate on the abstraction of virtual resources from your physical computing resources on predominately technical aspects. In order to instantiate a new VM potentially depends on a combination of CPU utilization, memory load and bandwidth throughput as the VM monitoring software detects changes in the VM. There is no consideration of the business application and service that is running on the VM in the cloud. Business priorities should also be considered in the cloud, such as if one specific application is more valuable to the business then more resources should be applied as needed. Also adding flexibility by providing the capability of virtualization of business applications and services across completely separate and different computing platforms (JEE, .NET, SOA, and clouds). Sensible Cloud has introduced the senseTM cloud control platform to solve these critical business challenges.
The sense platform enables the definition of business oriented criteria combined with the technical management of virtual resources. Business SLAs, are utilized to allocate VM resources to specific applications under specific conditions (and subsequent release when no longer required to comply with the desired SLA). This permits value based allocation and closely aligns the cloud resources to the demands of the applications. sense also provides this capability spanning the various computing models – JEE, web services, VMs and cloud based resources. The disparate platform interoperability allows extension of existing infrastructure to bridge to a cloud oriented model without making the complete leap.
One use case is to apply the sense virtualization platform to buffer current infrastructure resources in the case of additional load to avoid the expense and installation of additional hardware. Please see the sense platform for more details.
