Introduction

In today’s extremely competitive corporate environment, solutions need to be nimble and allow IT departments the ability to respond quickly to changes in their need for capacity and power usage. Companies look for innovative methods to reduce time to market for new applications and systems, and overall costs of the solutions. Today, all businesses face the challenges like the escalating price of power, raised floor capacity, space, and administrative costs. These difficult challenges are driving the need to utilize technology in new ways to maximize companies’ IT investment and ensure they are competitive in their market space.

This article is the first of a series that will focus on virtualization as an excellent vehicle to address business needs while controlling the ever-growing challenges of IT costs and data center sprawl. For large and small businesses to remain viable in the ever-evolving technology arena, companies need to adopt a strategy that works for them.

Several variations of virtualization can include hardware, software, SAN, and network. Many companies have designed or purchased virtualization solutions, Microsoft®, EMC®, Oracle®, Sun Microsystems®, and IBM® to name a few. Although few companies cover all areas and offer solutions to meet the future needs.

IBM stands out as one of two fathers of virtualization that started its evolutionary march in the early 1960’s. The development of the Hypervisor or virtual machine monitor by Atlas was improved upon and perfected by IBM over the next 40 years.

Back to top

Virtualization strategies

The two virtualization strategies highlighted in this article are VMware by EMC and PowerVM by IBM. One of the most common implementation benefits of server consolidation is to cure the common IT malady of underutilized servers. Consolidation projects have been popular long before green IT was the rage. Most companies without virtualization and server consolidation report UNIX® utilization at less than 20%, and operating systems on Intel® architecture at 7% or lower. This translates into under-utilized servers and idle capacity that wastes the IT dollar.

Cost savings are realized not only in reducing the number of servers, but in reducing the number of network and I/-O adapters, along with reducing floor space, power, and cooling demands. Virtualization facilitates server consolidation by allowing rapid response to changes in memory or CPU, as well as removing the need for a large number of I/O or network adapters.

The cost of research and development for this idea has been astronomical and has evolved over 40 years. The underlying message is, this is complex to do right and takes resource and time for the product to mature. This concept and practice of virtualization technology has evolved to be much more than just fancy programming on the mainframe.

Many companies work to figure out how and which virtualization solution is best for their environment. This can be a complex answer, for an IT Architect to explain. Deciding how best to utilize virtualization can be daunting at first. The first step is to plan a systematic approach and understand how the landscape looks today. New applications are easy to start deploying. Migration of test, development, and Q&A are also easy targets with minimal risk. VMware and PowerVM have similar attributes and share a commonality of what they do and even overlap on some workloads in the middle layer of an infrastructure.

VMware and PowerVM have two main differences. First is the architecture they run on. VMware runs on Intel or its AMD® clone with a massive number of operating systems that it supports as a guest host. It may suffice to say that PowerVM runs on the Power class systems. It supports AIX®, IBMi and Linux™ (RedHat and SuSe). From a support standpoint, IBM might not have every operating system (OS) under the sun but when things break (and yes they do break on all architecture no matter what the marketing material says), IBM has the distinct advantage for fixing issues as you only have one vendor to call. This is critical for enterprise level application and the service level agreement they need to meet business requirements. In a follow-on article, I will review availability, resiliency, and even mobility aspects.

The second difference between VMware and PowerVM that is truly notable is where the virtualization occurs. VMware is a guest OS on top of the hardware architecture which is the reason why it is so portable on Intel and AMD systems. This is a good feature when you look at the amount of systems in this space that are underutilized in data centers around the world. Every large database in the backend of a multi-tier application needs many middleware and front-end servers. PowerVM spends its life at the hypervisor layer of the Power hardware which allows it to take advantage of the physical architecture at a different level than VMware. It might not be as portable to other architectures but it is very flexible and scalable with considerably more I/O throughput and growth capability along with extreme granularity of the physical layer. This virtualization technology works well in all three areas of the software stack, from front-end and middleware to the large backend enterprise databases. The real advantage is then support, for IBM PowerVM, one vendor supports the virtualization technology and hardware when the pager goes off.

Back to top

Conclusion

Both solutions are designed to help slow the maelstrom that is accruing in data centers around the world. Hopefully these two solutions will lower the use of energy and drive utilization of physical resources for businesses. If the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Financial Officers of any sizable company continue to sit and do nothing about the growing costs of power and cooling along with the underutilization of their systems, they will find their organizations on the verge of become extinct.

Resources

Learn

• The PowerVM Virtualization on IBM System p: Introduction and Configuration Fourth Edition Redbook introduces PowerVM virtualization technologies on IBM System p servers.
  
  
• IBM PowerVM Live Partition Mobility Redbook discusses how Live Partition Mobility can help technical professionals, enterprise architects, and system administrators.
  
  
• Server Consolidation with VMware ESX Server Redpaper discusses server consolidation options and considerations using VMware ESX Server on IBM eServer BladeCenter and IBM eServer xSeries 445 hardware.
  
  
• Virtualization with VMware ESX Server details the default and custom installation of VMware's ESX server as well as basic and advanced virtual machine configurations.
  
  
• The GReen IT Report: Find resources for green computing and build your green skills.
  
  
• The AIX and UNIX developerWorks zone provides a wealth of information relating to all aspects of AIX systems administration.
  
  
• Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
  
  
• Browse the technology bookstore for books on these and other technical topics.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Download IBM product evaluation versions or explore the online trials in the IBM SOA Sandbox and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.
  
  

Discuss

• It's all about Green! group on My developerWorks: Join and connect with other developers about energy-efficient computing.
  
  
• Participate in the AIX and UNIX forums:
  • AIX Forum
  • AIX Forum for developers
  • Cluster Systems Management
  • IBM Support Assistant Forum
  • Performance Tools Forum
  • Virtualization Forum
  • More AIX and UNIX Forums
  
  
• Check out developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  

About the author

Mr. Petru has over twenty five years of experience in the technical industry and is a member of the British Computer Society with Chartered IT Professional status, and a Master Certified IT Professional with The OpenGroup. For the past two decades he has worked extensively in evaluating large corporate environments and has dealt effectively with identifying operating systems and software issues between different hardware platforms. Mr. Petru has written and taught more than thirty different course based on AIX, Internet Security, Linux, LPAR’s and Virtualization technology. Based on Jerry’s knowledge of working with complex systems, managing people, resources and projects he has played a major role in designing and providing long-term planning, along with strategic guidance for customers’ topologies to meet their complex business needs. He has focused on design architectures for their software stacks to take advantage of virtualization implementations and consolidation efforts to ensure that they are achieving their business goals with the technology that matches their job needs. Jerry is a great asset to any team due to managerial and leadership skills, his outstanding technical aptitude and extremely positive attitude.

Comments (Undergoing maintenance)

Back to top

Trademarks  |  My developerWorks terms and conditions

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Virtualization strategies
• Conclusion
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

Local resources

• IBM Innovation Center - Austin, TX
• IBM Innovation Center - Chicago, IL
• IBM Innovation Center - Dallas, TX
• IBM Innovation Center - San Mateo, CA
• IBM Innovation Center - Waltham, MA
• Technical Briefings in North America

My developerWorks community

Dig deeper into AIX and UNIX on developerWorks

Calling all developers

Download no charge Lotus Domino Designer

Special offers