10 Things You Should Know About Virtualization

With Citrixs recent XenSource acquisition, a new hypervisor on the way from Microsoft and Oracle now extending its sincere Red Hat flattery to the virtual world, the buzz around server virtualization is louder than ever. Here are 10 things to keep in min

Lately, it seems that every vendor is out to wave the virtualization flag. Cut through the buzz by focusing on functionality. If you get confused, ask your sales reps what their products used to be called before virtual-palooza began.

Virtualization can pay big dividends on big server iron, but you can build and test your VMs (virtual machines) on practically any system–from a notebook PC on up. A free desktop virtualization app such as VMware Player is a good place to get started.

Virtualization sucks up a great deal of storage. If youre testing out the technology on your notebook, turn to an external hard drive for extra capacity and speed. For production settings, a SAN (storage-area network) is a must-have&3151;you cant conduc

Consolidating several servers onto one can boost efficiency significantly, but dont allow your high-utilization virtual host to become a single point of failure. Fortunately, failover is a strong suit of most virtualization products.

A virtualization platform is nothing without some VMs to host. Software appliances such as those available from rPath, VMware and and Microsoft bundle the applications you wish to run with the operating system components these apps require to jump-start y

While virtualization products make it easy to turn a single physical server into a group of virtual servers, these products cant make software licenses magically multiply. Its important to stay on top of license needs as your VM population grows.

While most of the technology world is going virtual, not all ISVs are ready for a new platform. Make sure your vendor supports its products on your chosen virtualization platform.

The biggest name in virtualization right now is VMware, but the field is packed with new entrants. Pick the one whose cost, focus and functionality fit best with your organization.

In a one-application-per-server world, its easier to associate hardware costs with particular departments. Going virtual means devoting more attention to chargebacks within your company.

Virtualization can enable IT administrators to forget about the hardware and focus on the workloads with which theyre charged. For those charged with maintaining the virtual platform itself, however, virtualization does bring added complexity.

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