I didn’t get interested in virtualization until pretty recently. Earlier this year I had a long conversation with Serguei Beloussov from SWSoft. He said virtualization is the future; I said the entry barrier against Virtuozzo adoption seems unreasonably high. If you consider the licensing costs/learning curve on one hand, and the availability of cheaper/better hardware on the other, I wasn’t sure the math worked out. But since then…
* The launch of Amazon EC2 made a huge splash in the media and among developers, who rave about the convenience of on-demand virtual server instances with standardized machine images. Much easier than deploying and configuring physical equipment!
* I met 3tera through Nicholas Carr’s “software kills hardware” blog post. The company’s AppLogic grid operating system allows users to deploy, scale, copy, migrate or backup entire applications with one single command (!) by packaging web/app/db/storage infrastructure into one single logical entity. (I joined the company’s advisory board a few weeks ago.)
* The Las Vegas Water Valley District enjoyed seamless disaster recovery because its DNS and domain controllers ran on virtualized infrastructure. Thank goodness for VMWare, said the agency’s sysadmins. VMWare turns a server into a file. Because it’s just a file, you can copy and deploy it as needed.
* And last but not least, ArvatoMobile won InfoWorld’s Top 100 IT Projects Award for betting its server farm on Virtuozzo. The company’s entire infrastructure runs on 600 virtual servers. It’s also virtualized several hundred TBs of storage into a single file system namespace.
I think these new developments are really, really exciting. So I couldn’t believe it when Lance Crosby from SoftLayer mentioned that he thinks the dedicated servers market will survive. How? Why? Who wants the hassle of managing individual machines that are each a single point of failure??
As it turns out, AlertLogic does. (Note: the company’s infrastructure consists of several islands of server grids where processing nodes share the load; in its case there’s no single point of failure.) According to Misha Govshteyn’s blog post from yesterday:
“We know enough about the characteristics of our software that we can tell you with a high degree of accuracy the exact disk I/O, dedicated PCI bus bandwidth, network interrupt needs and even which compiler to use for each component to maximize performance.
While we’ve considered virtualization, we walked away from the idea every time. Fine tuning hardware resources to each software component and ensuring that your architecture can linearly scale requires a great deal of control. Our architecture encourages the most efficient use of highly distributed, but dedicated, servers and introducing a virtualization layer would only create resource contention. The performance tax of VMware or Xen just doesn’t justify the benefits in our case.“
The moral of the story is, I’ve got a lot of learning to do. As does every hosting provider, I think, so as to help customers make well-informed decisions between the pros (such as what the Las Vegas Water Valley District enjoyed) and cons (which AlertLogic is looking to avoid) of virtualization.
PS – Rackspace, for one, has given a lot of thought to this issue. I got an email from Lew Moorman as I was typing this post: “Virtualization will make servers easier to manage, more flexible and more powerful. But don’t focus too hard on the idea that they’ll go away. They won’t.” Thanks, Lew! 
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