Virtualisation now a reality
RESPECTED research house Gartner says virtualisation will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010, dramatically changing how IT departments manage, buy, deploy, plan and charge for their services. Gartner expects the installed base of virtual machines will grow more than tenfold.
That’s a bold statement. However, to take just one example from South Africa, virtualisation enables Vodacom to increase the number of servers at its new R100m data centre from 20 000 physical devices into 650 000 virtual machines. In terms of manageability, flexibility and cost-savings, virtualisation is a godsend for data centre managers.
But how does it affect the average laptop user? It provides the best of all worlds. Buy one computer and have access to all the software that’s out there. You can now be the owner of a Windows PC and run a Linux (such as the home-grown Ubuntu distribution) operating system at the same time. The same goes for Apple Mac users. The switch by Apple to Intel processors in 2006 changed the game for the company. A huge stumbling block for PC users thinking of switching to the Mac platform is that many of their favourite software packages designed for Windows were lost to them. Now MacBooks can run Windows Vista (or Linux, for that matter) with the help of off-the-shelf virtualisation software that sells for around R600.
What’s best about Parallels Desktop 4 and VMWare Fusion 2 – the best packages of desktop virtualisation – is that it’s surprisingly easy to use. No rebooting is required to switch between platforms. You can run Windows or Ubuntu in a window inside Apple’s OS X as if it’s simply just another application, and you can even launch Windows applications from within the Mac environment.
In Finweek’s test of Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion having both OSs running didn’t slow overall performance dramatically. However, machines with less oomph may struggle with all the processing that needs to be done. Windows-based PCs, such as those from HP and Dell, can run OS X with the help of virtualisation software – but that needs a bit of hacking.
VMWare has already announced it has developed technology to make virtualisation possible on cellphones. It could be possible to then run (for example) Nokia software on a Sony Ericsson cellphone side-by-side and switching from one to the other at any time. That sort of configuration will probably not be available soon but virtualisation will be bringing many more benefits to the tech savvy consumer in future.
What is virtualisation?
The technology involves taking multiple physical devices and combining them into manageable and adaptable units that are presented to the operating system, applications and users. It builds a layer of abstraction above the physical device – be that storage, servers or client devices – so that data isn’t tied to specific hardware.
Finweek
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