Breaking down barriers to enterprise-wide virtualisation

Red Hat’s Geert Jansen explains why the current barriers to 100 percent virtualisation are neither inevitable nor insurmountable.

The well-known advantages of virtualisation include greater efficiency and flexibility, improved compliance, reduced risk, enhanced business continuity and lower costs. Having a more agile IT infrastructure with fewer physical servers to procure, power and manage is an extremely attractive proposition, especially in today's climate of shrinking budgets and volatile operating conditions. Yet analysts estimate that to date only approximately 15 percent of servers are virtualised. The limitations in currently available proprietary solutions have prevented pervasive adoption of virtualisation across the enterprise.

Technical barriers

The wider application of virtualisation is constrained by poor performance, due to significantly increased server overhead; limited scalability, with only a small number of virtual CPUs normally supported; and security concerns, with typically a single level of isolation between low and high security workloads.

Red Hat has removed these barriers by using the latest generation Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to turn Linux, the world's most scalable and highest performing operating system, into a virtualisation platform. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation capitalises on the effort that has been invested in Linux over many years, resulting in impressive performance, scalability and security. Users experience the benefits of a proven virtualisation platform, tested and certified by the leading hardware vendors and hardened in exceptionally demanding environments.

Applications previously excluded from virtualisation projects because of performance and scalability limitations under proprietary solutions now become suitable candidates. Furthermore, a proactive, military-grade security system, co-developed by Red Hat and the US National Security Agency, protects sensitive applications and data by maintaining an extremely strong, multi-level separation between workloads.

Ecosystem barriers

The entire hardware and software ecosystem needs to be aligned to support cost-effective virtualisation deployment. For example, there can be compatibility issues where third-party applications have not been certified to run on a virtualised platform. The user becomes caught between the independent software vendor (ISV), the provider of virtualisation solution, and the operating system vendor - with all parties reluctant to own the problem.

Red Hat removes these barriers by ensuring that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation inherits the broad hardware and software ecosystem available to our customers for over a decade. KVM is integrated into the Linux kernel, so if the hardware runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it supports virtualisation hardware extensions from Intel or AMD, it runs Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation. This creates a choice of over 1000 certified hardware platforms.

Similarly, thousands of software applications which run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux can also run virtualised under Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation. This supports pervasive virtualisation deployments because now, if there are application issues, enterprises do not have to recreate the problems on physical hardware.

Cost barriers

The high cost of software licences, future upgrades and updates, and the requirement to sign up for long-term contracts deter many organisations from extending virtualisation enterprise-wide. Red Hat removes these barriers with a 'pay-as-you-go' subscription model. Capital expenditure is turned into operational expenditure and, with yearly subscription fees in the same range as the support fees for current proprietary offerings, all the expense of licensing can be eliminated. Visit www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/server/cost for a total cost of ownership calculator which compares Red Hat with other popular offerings.

Geert Jansen, Product Marketing Manager EMEA at Red Hat, is responsible for product marketing of Red Hat's infrastructure products in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Prior to joining Red Hat, Jansen spent five years at Royal Dutch Shell and prior to this as a software engineer at an internet search engine company.

Five tough questions to ask a virtualisation provider:

1. What percentage of our server workload can realistically be virtualised?
2. How can we safeguard workloads, without introducing silos and while still enjoying dynamic placement?
3. What are the scalability limits of your solution?
4. What are the total costs of running your solution over a three-year period?
5. Will my ISV require me to reproduce problems on physical hardware?