Virtualization solutions have been maturing for a few years now, driven by business needs to better utilize the enormous sums of capital and maintenance expenses invested in computer hardware and communications infrastructure. One particular field receiving a great deal of attention lately, is Virtualization servers – the prime benefit of which is to offer a logical division (or partitioning) of available computer servers, over and above the physical computer hardware itself. This allows for much better management and utilization of the underlying hardware by the applications needing them. Effectively, you can run X Virtual Machines (VM) over Y physical machines and allocate resources independently of the physical make up of the hardware. It should be noted that this concept is not new at all, and in fact is decades old, with IBM mainframes and other UNIX machines offering this capability for many years. The main difference today is the use of commodity priced PC type hardware components and open sources middleware software, which make the overall costs of putting together large quantities of computing resources much more reasonable and scalable.

But even this is not enough. While Virtualization solutions concentrate on the abstraction of virtual computing resources from your physical computing resource, it does so based on largely technical qualities. For instance, being able to instantiate a new VM most probably depends on some combination of CPU utilization, memory load or bandwidth throughput as the VM monitoring software detect changes in performance of the VM – with no thought as to what business application or service is actually running on the VM. Who takes care of the business drivers that say; “this application is more valuable to my business than that one, and I want more resources applied to this when it needs them”. Also how do you virtualize your business applications and services over completely separate and different computing platforms (JEE, .NET, SOA, and Clouds). It is to solve these critical issues that Sensible Cloud has introduced our sense virtualization platform.

Combined with the technical management of virtual resource, the sense virtualization platform lets users define business oriented criteria, Business SLAs, by which the VM resources are allocated to specific applications under specific conditions (and subsequently releases them when no longer required to match the desired SLA). This permits a value based allocation and more closely aligns the resources to the applications that need them. The sense virtualization platform also provides this capability spanning the various computing models – JEE, .Net, VMs and cloud based resources, thus allowing you to extend your existing infrastructure to include this model without making the complete leap.  One use case is to use the sense virtualization platform to buffer your own infrastructure in the case of additional load, without the need to buy and install additional hardware.  Please see sense virtualization platform for more details.

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We have looked at the leading Virtualization server providers and extended the sense cloud application platform to two Virtualization technology providers.

Xen and VMWare are the leading Virtualization server providers today, and offer best in class performance for both servers and operating systems together with the highest degree of management functionality. So, while every modern operating system can be virtualized with industry-leading performance, they all suffer for being disconnected from a business approach to scaling.

The sense virtualization platform compliments existing Virtualization servers.  Built on sense the sense virtualization platform federates VMs to;

• extend VMs to both traditional JEE infrastructure and to cloud computing resources (like Amazon EC2 and others) – you can operate a virtual pool of resources across multiple platform types
• add critical business constraints on how the VMs are scaled to satisfy defined _business SLA_s – this lets you add business conditions for scaling VM resources to the technical criteria generally available from today’s _virtualization servers_

The role of Sensible Cloud’s innovative cloud application platform sense, is to match the business layers of an agreement (Business SLA) with the physical layer of a virtualized platform, by instantiating the right number and quality of VMs depending on defined business rules, and maintaining a consistent and real time catalogue of what “hardware” in the cloud is available to operate a new VM instance.

sense virtualization platform

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