Evaluation of Open Source Virtualization Tools

Evaluation of Open Source Virtualization Tools



Evaluation of Open Source Virtualization Tools

Introduction

Virtualization is quickly becoming an important technology across all parts of the IT environment. The technology is rapidly being incorporated in storage, networks, and client environments. By far the most visible adoption of virtualization technology is happening in servers from the largest Unix server to the smallest volume system. Virtualization software breaks the link between a given software-driven application or service and the hardware resources of the underlying system and encapsulates and isolates that stack or service. It is being used as a tool for consolidation and more recently as a means to bring high availability, disaster recovery, and resource balancing to a larger part of organizations' IT infrastructures. Sun is emphasizing choice in how companies virtualize. The company is developing, partnering, and making technology available so that virtualization can evolve rapidly and deliver more value to organizations. By focusing on innovation, both through its own development and by making technology available to the community, Sun is working to ensure that users have access to a portfolio of virtualization tools to address a broad base of business requirements. Sun is also incorporating virtualization management into its N1 System Manager so that customers have a single pane of glass when managing their infrastructures. Sun's customer-driven approach for how companies organize and manage their virtual environments will enable customers to choose the right virtualization tool for the job yet still maintain cohesive management of a heterogeneous environment. This customer-centric approach will allow virtualization to become a standard deployment scenario for the enterprise.

Task 1:

It's been said that everything old is new again, and that saying is particularly appropriate for system virtualization. Virtualization and system partitioning have existed for decades aboard mainframe and Unix based systems. What's new is the concept of bringing this virtualization technology to small and medium-scale x86- based servers. According to IDC, as shown in Figure 1, worldwide shipments of server hardware platforms with virtualization capabilities installed are currently forecast to grow rapidly from 330,000 units in 2005 to over 1,400,000 units in 2010, driving over $18 billion in customer spending of hardware, software, and services in support of virtualized environments.

Virtualization software breaks the link between - or "decouples" - a given softwaredriven application or service and the hardware resources of the underlying system. This decoupling means that functionality delivered by software may survive the unexpected loss of the original host systems. As these capabilities become more widely adopted, leading organizations are empowered to look at their IT infrastructures as a pool of shared resources to drive utilization, agility, and resiliency across all IT services. The following descriptions highlight each of the core segments of the virtualization market: Virtual access software. This software allows applications to be accessed from nearly any intelligent access point device over just about any network, without the applications having to have been architected to support that device or ...