January 2007 - Rise of the Virtual Machine

What do you do when you have too many physical servers to fit in your server room but not enough servers to run all of your workloads? Answer... virtualize.

Server virtualization, the IT trend for 2006 and beyond, has developed momentum based on its promise of better hardware utilization, lower capital and support costs, rapid deployment of new workloads and zero down time server administration. Server virtualization also creates new options for Disaster Recovery, provides better application availability (uptime) and, for the first time, gives PC server administrators the ability to proactively plan for and manage growth.

There is an entirely new IT eco-system building around virtualization. Traditional players including PC server manufacturers are building virtualization-friendly servers while VARs and Integrators are ramping up their professional services offerings to meet demand. Software vendors are responding to the needs of virtualization customers with management, monitoring, backup and other solutions uniquely tailored to virtualization.

Virtual Appliances

Before 2006, virtualization was used primarily to host traditional PC workloads such as Windows or Linux operating systems running File and Print, Web, E-mail, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Database or legacy applications. That changed last summer when VMware™ introduced the notion of a Virtual Appliance.

Most IT appliances, from the lowly Cable/DSL router to enterprise class security products are in fact, specialized computers. These appliances contain an operating system, an application, a management interface, monitoring tools and other capabilities that are neatly packaged into an easy-to-use, fixed function machine. Through new product offerings like VMware Player® and VMware Server®, VMware made it possible to create fixed function virtual machines to take the place of fixed function physical appliances, at no cost for the virtualization software.

Physical appliances contain processors, RAM, network interfaces and occasionally hard disks. They boot, run and sometimes crash just like general-purpose computers. Because their speed and health depend on their underlying hardware, physical appliances have performance and reliability limits that may lead to unanticipated slow downs or even infrastructure failures. For example, does it really make sense to protect a large enterprise with a security appliance that relies on a consumer grade IDE hard disk (as found in some Antispam products)? When organizations discover they are at risk due to inferior hardware, solving the problem may entail costly upgrades or more complex appliance clustering configurations.

Organizations who commit to virtualization often start by purchasing enterprise class PC servers and centralized data Storage Area Networks (SANs) along with the management, backup and support tools needed to ensure smooth, reliable operation (Virtual Infrastructure). Virtual workloads (any operating system and application pair) that runs on this virtual infrastructure benefits from the superior performance and reliability of this new hardware.

The Benefits of Virtual Appliances

Virtual appliances offer many advantages over their physical counterparts. Because they are virtual, they can be backed up while they are running. Virtual appliances can be rebooted automatically if they crash. If a disaster occurs, virtual appliances can be quickly restored and restarted. This reduces or eliminates the need to either purchase multiple physical appliances or cluster physical appliances. Finally, there are no RMAs or shipping delays when replacing or repairing a virtual appliance.

Virtual hardware (processor, memory, disk) presented to a virtual appliance will typically be many times more powerful than the hardware found in a physical appliance. Consequently, virtual appliances should be as fast as or, faster than their physical counterpart. Virtual appliances can be scaled up with more memory, more processor and faster disk whereas an overworked physical appliance would need to be replaced with more capable and more costly models.

There are already dozens of options available including firewalls, proxy servers, network monitoring solutions, etc. You can review current virtual appliance offerings here.

Summary

Virtual appliances provide many benefits over their physical counterparts. Virtual appliances may be rapidly deployed, backed up, recovered, upgraded and monitored with very little effort, and no additional hardware cost.

Companies already looking at virtual servers to reduce their dependency on physical PC servers should also look at virtual appliances to reduce the cost, risk and overhead of managing physical appliances.

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I hope you found this article useful. My intent is to help organizations understand, assess and effectively defend against e-mail threats. I would like to receive your thoughts on this article. Please direct your comments by e-mail to Larry Karnis.

© 2007 by Larry Karnis and XPMsoftware. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to quote from this article in whole or in part, or to reproduce this article by any means as long as the the author and XPMsoftware receive appropriate attribution.

About the Author

Comments on this article should be directed to lkarnis@xpmsoftware.com.