What is virtualization?

Hello, my name is Dan Chu. I'm Senior Director of Products at VM Ware. Today I'm going to talk to you about what is virtualization. To set the stage, virtualization is a trend that is sweeping enterprise IT. The overall environment has over seven million servers being shipped worldwide every year. Now, out of those over six million of those servers are Intel architecture X86 volume servers. Now, these are getting deployed into enterprise data centers by the hundreds, by the thousands, even by the tens of thousands into large enterprises.

Now, these are traditional servers with single applications running on operating systems and they are sprawled out across these data centers. This leads to tremendous cost in a number of areas in terms of hardware, in terms of data center and facilities cost, in terms of operational, management and maintenance costs.

Now, to address these overwhelming pressures and costs what enterprise IT has found as the most compelling tool is virtualization technology. Across these millions of servers the average utilization, the average of each of these environments, these applications is 5 to 10 percent. These servers are barely utilized across the environment. 90 to 95 percent of their capacity isn't being used on average.

So what virtualization technology does is it allows you to take advantage of that as well as some very fine grain technology to run these environments side by side on a much lower number of physical servers. To illustrate that, we take these environments-it could be databases and business applications, e-commerce applications, web servers-and you can take them down and consolidate them to a much smaller number of physical servers. Each of these environments now runs side by side on a single machine and each of them is fully isolated and fully encapsulated.

To show you what that means, each of these servers, what you have here, what you had in the physical environment, there's a hardware layer, there's a virtualization layer that enables all this. And then on top of that you have each of these environments, whether they be a database or an application server or a domain controller, they all have their separate operating systems-it could be Windows, it could be Linux, it could be Solaris-and on top of these each of these applications run side by side and each of these server environments has its own CPU, has its own memory, has its own Ethernet NIX, has its own disk. And so they run in isolation just as they would in a physical environment.

Now, what does this mean for an IT customer? It means that you get tremendous savings. On average, the kinds of consolidation ratios that users have seen today range on the order of 10 to 1, 15 to 1, even 20 to 1, meaning that customer data that's running 800 servers or was running 800 servers in a physical environment can now consolidate that down to a number like 60 servers. And the benefits of that in terms of hardware, in terms of data center, the ROI is tremendous. On average customers are finding that the return on investment they're getting is in less than three to six months.

And in addition, it also completely changes how customers can provision their applications, provision their server environments. So if you take how you initiate a new service or a new application before, putting this out into your data server took a number of weeks to procure the hardware, to install the OS and patch it, then to deploy the application and configure that. Now because all this is in software, instantiating this takes a matter of minutes.