| As we know, drowning men must save themselves. So while politicians are thinking about how to save the country from the developing crisis, companies are seriously reshaping and cutting their budgets in order to survive in these difficult times. They are saving on absolutely everything today: they are cutting staff, suspending projects. The saying «A penny saved is a penny earned» may well become the motto of our difficult times. Company management is starting to focus on optimizing resources and increasing the return on investment in any investments in the company's infrastructure.
Such economic processes are attracting closer attention from large Russian companies to virtualization technologies, which have long been used in the West in the largest financial and industrial corporations, educational institutions, social organizations, and even as a platform for managing the processes of entire cities.
What is virtualization
Virtualization is a means of organizing several virtual computers on one real one. Although the technology itself has existed for about 40 years, it was forgotten until 1998, when VMware, the current market leader, managed to implement full virtualization technology on the x86 architecture. Virtualization can be used for server consolidation, application development and testing, business IT solutions, or virtual workstation implementation.
Advantages and disadvantages of virtualization
The main advantages of virtualization include the following:
— significant savings on hardware (server consolidation leads to significant savings on maintenance, management and administration of server infrastructure)
— the ability to support old operating systems to ensure compatibility;
— the ability to isolate potentially dangerous environments;
— the ability to create virtual machines to represent devices that you do not have;
— the ability to run and combine multiple virtual machines from a single host;
— increased mobility of the IT infrastructure;
— high manageability of virtual machines in terms of creating backups, creating snapshots of virtual machine states, and recovering from failures.
Some disadvantages of using virtual machines:
— the need for additional hardware resources (some virtual machines require a fairly large amount of hardware resources to run on a physical host);
— strict hardware requirements imposed by some virtualization platforms;
— high cost of good virtualization platforms.
Virtualization Market
The main players in the virtualization market are:
VMware Inc. entered the market with virtualization technologies for x86 computers in 1998 and currently, according to various estimates, occupies 70 to 80% of the market. Today, WMware offers a comprehensive solution for third-generation virtualization, both for PCs and data centers, and continues to develop its product line with applications aimed primarily at saving customers' resources and ensuring the continuity of their business. In 2008, VMware Inc. organized the world's first international conference on virtualization, VMworld Europe 2008, which was a great success.
Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has been actively developing the desktop virtualization direction in recent years. Headquartered in the United States and with development centers in Moscow and Novosibirsk, the company was founded in the late 1990s by a group of Russian specialists. Initially, the company became famous thanks to the Virtuozzo server virtualization technology, then, having become interested in the PC virtualization direction, it organized a subsidiary company, Parallels, for these purposes, with which it eventually merged. The company provides customers with an extensive package of software technologies for virtualization and automation of multi-platform computing environments.
Microsoft Corporation entered the virtualization market in 2003. And today it has almost completed the formation of its virtualization platform.
Specialized virtualization solutions are also offered by Sun Microsystems and Citrix Systems, and in November 2007 Oracle announced its entry into the virtualization market.
In the West, virtualization is now an integral part of the IT infrastructure of large companies, providing not only significant savings in physical resources (fewer physical machines, less maintenance time, lower energy costs), but also support for business as such (ensuring business continuity through disaster recovery programs).
In Russia, virtualization is just beginning its journey. Russian customers are still mastering virtualization technologies, focusing more on secondary tasks of software development and testing than on the operation of business applications. However, market confidence in the technology is gradually increasing, and IT infrastructures of large companies are striving to optimize corporate IT resources. Thus, according to forecasts by leading experts, interest in virtualization technologies will grow provided that the level of customer competence increases.
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