- Is there sufficient server capacity?
- Can the network infrastructure handle user bandwidth
requirements?
- Is there sufficient storage capacity?
- Is there sufficient RAM?
- How does the chosen software vendor treat licensing in a
virtualised environment, in order to avoid excessive licensing costs
- Investigating which architectures require specific RAID
controllers and/or CPUs
- Being aware of how many virtual machines are being created - too many virtual machines can create inefficiencies,
causing what’s known as VM sprawl
F
irst Distribution offers a broad array of worldclass virtualisation solutions, from best-ofbreed and industry-leading vendors. It also has
highly-skilled and trained solutions architects
available to advise and configure setups according to individual business needs.
For more information on First Distribution’s virtualisation
portfolio, refer to The Stack on page 43 and contact your
First Distribution account manager.
Looking Ahead
As technology develops and advances, so too will virtualisation. As the cloud industry grows and expands, so
virtualisation companies continue to push the boundaries of
what’s possible and what’s even defined as virtualisation.
New demands, such as the software-defined data centre
(SDDC), are pushing virtualisation technology forward.
The SDDC is a vision for IT infrastructure that extends
virtualisation concepts such as abstraction, pooling, and
automation to all of the data centre’s resources and services to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS). All elements of the
infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security –
are virtualised and delivered as a service. This technology
is poised to continue virtualisation’s rapid rise within the IT
world - the software-defined networking market is expected
to be valued at about USD $3.7 billion by 2016, compared
to USD $360 million in 2013, over 10 times today’s value. IDC also estimates that the software-defined storage
market is poised to expand faster than any other storage
market.
The advent of the SDDC will place new demands on
hypervisors as well, which will have to handle IO-intensive
network and storage virtual appliances, as well as traditional applications. The hypervisor of tomorrow will need to be
denser in order to handle increasing processor cores and
threads, which has led to new hypervisor designs created
expressly to cope in such environments.
As with any technology in the IT industry, it’s borderline
impossible to predict too far down the road regarding what
may change or where the landscape may lie at a certain
point in time. New and unforeseen advances have a habit
of sweeping in from leftfield and disrupting the status quo.
Nevertheless, there can be no denying the impact which
virtualisation has left, and continues to leave, on the greater
industry as a whole.
References:
Desktop virtualisation lowers costs, boosts flexibility, by Exposure, published on IT Web.co.za | Mid-market adopts ‘virtualisation first’ approach, by Admire Moyo,
published on IT Web.co.za | Virtualisation: Much more than just the latest IT buzzword, by Lucy Soper, published on business2community.com | Five new
virtualisation challenges impacting IT pros and data center management, by SolarWinds, published on marketwired.com | The 8 key challenges of virtualizing your
data center, by Jennifer Mears, published on networkworld.com | What are the different types of virtualization?, by The Editor, published on virtualizationadmin.com |
VMware, published on Wikipedia.org | Virtualization: is it right for my business?, by Megan Berry, published on itmanagerdaily.com | Software-defined datacenter,
published on Wikipedia.org | The future of virtualization, by Penny Jones, published on datacenterdynamics.com
18 | www.firstdistribution.co.za