Our journey into the virtual world
Virtual Machines, or simply, VMs—who doesn't know what they are? Even a business user who has never seen one knows what it is. It is just a physical server, virtualized—nothing more.
Wise men say that small leaks sink the ship. I think that's a good way to explain why IT departments that manage physical servers well struggle when the same servers are virtualized.
We can also use the Pareto principle (80/20 rule): 80 percent of a VM is identical to a physical server. But it's the 20 percent of differences that hits you. We will highlight some of this 20 percent portion, focusing on areas that impact data center management.
The change caused by virtualization is much larger than the changes brought about by previous technologies. In the past two or more decades, we transitioned from mainframes to the client/server-based model and then to the web-based model. These are commonly agreed upon as the main evolutions in IT architecture...