IT executives are setting aggressive targets for virtualisation in the data center. Executives are asking how far they can drive virtualization and have begun to set targets for widespread use of server virtualization in production server environments - 61% plan to virtualize more than half of their enterprise production x86 servers in the next two years.
A report, "How Server and Network Virtualization make Data Centers more Dynamic", from Forrester Research revealed that 73% of over 1,200 US and European executives said are running production environments with more than 50 virtualization hosts. Furthermore, almost 84% have virtualized more than 21% of their production server environments.
The report said: "Server virtualization technologies have been available on x86 systems for roughly ten years, and 55% of respondents now tell us that their firms have two or more years of experience in running the technology in both production and non-production environments. As your organization becomes more experienced with server virtualization and uses it for more production systems, advanced features like live migration become important to scheduling system maintenance and balancing resource consumption."
Most firms (69%) still use traditional server administrators to run their virtualized environment while twenty-nine percent have created a relatively new job description - the virtual infrastructure administrator - to run their virtual server hardware.
The report also focuses on building a virtual dynamic data center around the network.
It said that in order to establish virtual networking, a very fast, low-latency network pipe over which all I/O can be consolidated should be developed.
That one pipe would encapsulate multiple Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports over a single high-speed fabric. "Servers using a form of shared I/O would not need to be configured with lots of various redundant Ethernet or Fibre Channel adapters for different kinds of physical networks. A major advantage would be a drastic reduction in the number of adapters and ports - a 4 GB Fibre Channel adapter now costs about the same amount as a 10 GbE adapter.
With the cost per 10 GbE switch port dropping into Fibre Channel range, it will make sense to consolidate on a single data center network technology rather than maintain multiple parallel networks with separate administrators and management tools. In addition, all these physical network adapters and wires create a distinct server personality that makes them harder to reassign to different workloads that may be found in virtualized environments - some workloads might need lots of Fibre Channel SAN bandwidth, while others need only Ethernet. In order for virtual machines to be able to execute on any server, we'd have to provision all of them with an unnecessary number of Fibre Channel adapters so that we could support any workload on any machine."
The report was commissioned by Cisco.

To see the full whitepaper see Datacenterdynamics.com whitepaper section