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What the Salesman Did Not Tell You: The Murky Side of Virtualisation

Pressure from the top boss to increase Return on Investment (ROI) and decrease Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can lead to you take hasty decisions resulting in diametrically opposite consequences. While your understand the immense possibilities and savings in terms of hardware and power that virtualisation has to offer, it is important to be realistic and understand the drawbacks in order to make a fair judgment before you invest in it.

Following are some of the most notable drawbacks of virtualisation. Read on know what a muddle slapdash virtualisation execution can put you in.

Additional Hardware Costs: minimal disaster recovery time is one of the alleged advantages of server virtualisation. If you explore deeper this actually involves investing in redundant hardware to ensure that the failure of one physical server allows you to restart your virtual machines on a backup server, which probably shares storage space with the failed server on a SAN or an NAS. And use of archaic computers as the backup server is not an option as virtualisation is a hardware monster and requires high-end machines. The costs can be reduced by assigning priorities to the applications running on the Virtual Machines. Second, carefully consider the criticality of the applications before employing an al round 1+1 backup scheme.

Staff Training Requisites: virtualisation alone cannot be the answer to all your IT problems. Ensuring the staff assigned to maintain and monitor the virtual machines gets significant training before the technology is officially deployed is of high importance as well. Maintaining virtual machines will involve dynamic and sometimes manual resource allocation since the responsiveness of critical applications can go down if they do not have access to the amount of resources they require. Training ensures smoother transition between legacy systems and newer virtualised systems.

Readiness Tests: an adventurous company ,after reaping the benefits of infrastructure virtualisation, may rush into server virtualisation without conducting operational readiness tests (selectively neglected for no known reason). The importance of conducting these tests can later on come as a rude awakening when the ROI numbers do not look as good as they did on paper.

Application Incompatibility: it has been seen that applications that work perfectly fine on standalone physical servers lose certain functionality and cause problems when they are deployed on to virtual machines. This is usually because of middleware dependencies and configuration issues and can be rectified easily.

Virtual Machine Sprawl: because creating new virtualised servers is so quick and easy, many organizations have a problem with “VM Sprawl”. With VM Sprawl, the number of virtual machines (VM) running in a virtualized infrastructure increases over time, any they may not be absolutely necessary for the business. To prevent virtualisation sprawl, the administrator should define and enforce a process for the deployment of VMs and create a library of standardized VM image files. VMs that are being under-utilised should be archived.

Results of a survey conducted recently show that 80 percent of all large corporations have implemented virtualisation in one of its many forms but only 10 percent have delved into virtualising their servers. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages by far, and it pays to venture in to implementing virtualisation with a thorough understanding of the pros and cons.

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CollabNet® has acquired Codesion™, Inc. (formerly CVSDude), which provides an enterprise-grade Subversion hosting platform and serves more than 3,400 customers and 70,000 users in 90 countries. CollabNet founded the Subversion open source project in 2000 and remains the project’s principal sponsor.

Business Transformation vs. SOA Transformation - Can I do Both?

Corporations are transforming their business models in an attempt to increase revenue, operational efficiency and global competition by designing innovative business models and processes to be disruptive in their market space. In this keynote, recorded at Saltmarch Media's Business Technology Summit 2008, the Vice President of IBM's Global Solutions and Assets division says business leaders are looking for IT to provide and support the disruptive business models. However, the majority of IT's budget and resources are spent in maintenance leaving little time and resources for IT to be innovative and meet the business demands. In addition, many IT Corporations have adopted SOA in adhoc fashion and achieved some maturity in the technology. The key to aligning the IT objectives with the business objectives is a structured approach. Come hear about new ways to develop the required capabilities and prioritize the initiatives to create a Business and SOA transformation roadmap.

Brian Behlendorf on Open Source, Subversion 1.5, the rise of Globalization and Carbon Offsets

Brian Behlendorf, Founder and former CTO of Collabnet, in a free-wheeling interview talks about the concept of an open source company in today's world, the indirect economic value being created by open source projects, the commercial drivers behind open source projects, the intense sharing culture promoted by social networking and collaboration tools, and his green responsibilities and how he carbon offsets his travel. Brian also discusses how application development needs to change to meet the needs of an increasingly globalized world, benefits of a virtualized infrastructure management system, factors that will hinder adoption of Subversion 1.5 and how Subversion stacks up against the competition.

CollabNet Acquires Subversion Cloud Hosting Provider Codesion

Best Practices for Enterprise SOA Deployment

Bob Marcus, the leader for SOA and Distributed Virtualization standards at the Network Centric Operation Industry Consortium (NCOIC.org), discusses requirements and best practices for enterprise SOA Deployment, in this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Business Technology Summit 2008. The session is based on Bob's experience working with large enterprises such as General Motors and Boeing. It also includes recommendations from a Session on 'SOA Deployment: Industry Best Practices' that Bob has organized for several US government agencies.

Designing Reusable Service Interfaces

One of the challenges of SOA is the development of services, which are reusable. Such services can participate in several different processes and orchestrations. Experienced architects are aware that designing and implementing reusable services is much harder task than implementing services for single use. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Business Technology Summit 2008, Matjaz B. Juric discusses best practices for designing reusable service interfaces. We will discuss the possibilities provided by WSDL. We will address the versioning issue, which becomes crucial when changing/modifying services in order to make them more reusable.

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