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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