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Death, Taxes, Virtualization and Constant Change
More than 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Fast-forward to today’s world of virtualization technology and the certainties are diversity and rise of KVM. No matter where I look, it is clear that data centers are employing a mix of virtualization types and KVM is making strides as the strong #2 virtualization technology behind VMware. And, anecdotally, from the people I talk with, I hear the same thing over and over.
Recently, some research surveys provided data that make these new certainties abundantly clear. In the fifth annual x86 Gabriel Consulting Group Data Center Survey, which is appropriately titled Hyperversity’ Rages On, it was reported, “We find that two-thirds of our enterprise respondents are using at least two virtualization mechanisms. KVM is the only hypervisor in our last two surveys to notch gains in both the number of overall users and in the number of users adopting it as their standard go-to hypervisor.”
On the cloud side, our friends at Zenoss recently reported that diversity is alive, well and growing, thank to open source. In fact, it’s become very clear that without open source, cloud computing would barely exist.
And, a survey by Aberdeen reported: “When you add together the categories of ‘Primary’ and ‘Also Use’ you find on average that organizations use 2.5 different hypervisors in their datacenter. Over half (58%) of all responding organizations reported having a KVM presence in their datacenter.”
So, the heterogeneous data center is here and sure enough, we’re seeing the emergence of VMware alternatives – even in predominantly VMware data centers. Specifically with regard to KVM, Gabriel Consulting offered an explanation for its popularity reporting: “KVM is different from the others in a couple of crucial ways. It’s the only hypervisor that’s actually part of Linux and uses the Linux scheduler and memory manager. Both VMware and Xen are external hypervisors and therefore need to have control mechanisms for the entire system, making them larger and more complex.”
Another thing that these findings tell us is that he KVM ecosystem is much bigger and more diverse than a single vendor. As companies seek to build out their virtual and cloud infrastructures, they can take comfort in the notion that there is no 800-pound gorilla to rough them up. Rather, there are numerous smart companies competing for their business.
So, add to “death” and “taxes” – change. Isaac Asimov nailed it: “The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”
Asimov was obviously not talking about the fast-moving world of virtualization and cloud technology, but his words sure do ring true.
2012-10-22 14:42:50
Source: http://www.convirture.com/blog/2012/general/death-taxes-virtualization-and-constant-change/
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