Virtualisation

Virtualisation is a hot topic today and is especially interesting for the New Zealand market where many companies run Windows servers that are very under-utilised. With the emergence of chip-based support for hypervisors and powerful enterprise management capability, virtualisation is looking increasingly attractive and should be a part of today's enterprise architecture.

The traditional leader in 'bare-metal' virtualisation, VMWare ESX, now has serious competition from the XEN platform, and the market is set to become further stimulated with Microsoft entering the market with Hyper-V. Technologies, products, price and server hardware are combining to make virtualisation the single most significant IT proposition for businesses.

The potential for virtualisation to revolutionise the way we think about IT effects almost every aspect of the eco system. A core driver for virtualisation could be server consolidation, but a business case could also be built on any one of many aspects including:

• Rapid services provisioning and enhanced systems lifecycles
• Enhanced software development benefiting from a single abstract 'hardware' layer
• Disaster recovery and business continuity
• Reduced complexity, simpler and more flexible management
• Environmental credentials

A comprehensive virtualisation strategy should be married closely to the overall infrastructure architecture. In the near future most environments will be hybrids that include both virtualised and non-virtualised components. It is quite likely that in the medium term the hybrid model will be completely replaced with fully-virtualised environments.