Virtualization: The Next Generation
March 21, 2011
Every now and again, a vendor comes up with a good idea that is much bigger than itself. Such is the case with vApps from VMware, applications that behave as one logical entity even though they span multiple virtual machine environments.
The issue with vApps, however, is that as the virtual world becomes more heterogeneous, the need to manage applications across virtual machines from multiple vendors increases significantly.
That is the end goal of Abiquo, a provider of virtualization management software, says newly appointed vice president of marketing Wendy Perilli, who is intensely familiar with all things VMware after recently leaving her post as the head of marketing for VMware’s vCloud Director product, also known as Project Redwood.
Perilli says Abiquo represents the next plateau in virtualization because it provides a framework for addressing the management of multiple virtual machine environments. It’s extremely unlikely that IT organizations will ever be able to optimize their applications around a single virtual machine. While VMware dominates the enterprise today, the Xen virtual machine tends to be favored in public cloud computing scenarios. At the same time, Microsoft is getting more aggressive about its Hyper-V virtualization platform with each passing day, and Oracle and IBM both have ambitions for promoting their own virtual machine software offerings on a variety of platforms.
As such, applications are by definition going to need to run across multiple virtual machines, especially as application workloads running across mainframe, UNIX/RISC servers and X86 servers converge. Forward-thinking IT organizations need to start putting in place today the right kind of IT management infrastructure if they want to be able to take advantage of multi-platform virtualization tomorrow.
Besides, standardizing on one virtual machine platform is an invitation to become overly dependent on one software vendor, and we’ve already seen how that movie plays out multiple times in terms of licensing and maintenance fees.