Virtualization is the hottest subject today, triggering dramatic changes in product offerings and business practices to support virtualized operational models.

Virtualization Journal covers these breakneck speed developments, including all aspects of the plethora of solutions that's already emerged as more and more companies turn to virtualization to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands.

CONTENTS:

3 FROM THE EDITOR
The Rising Value and Power f Virtualization
JEREMY GEELAN

DEPLOYING
6 Two Best Practices for eploying VDI
SUMIT DHAWAN

VIRTUALIZATION
8 SOA and Virtualization for mproved Application Availability
TOM WOTEKI

DATA
14 The Importance of Data onnectivity to Virtualization
MIKE JOHNSON

VIRTUALIZATION
20 The Environmental Benefits of Virtualization
BY CHRISTIAN DAWSON

VIRTUALIZATION
24 Virtualization Is Happening Today
RICHARD MUIRHEAD

DATA CENTERS 28 Re-Thinking Your Disaster

Recovery Strategy
DAN LAMORENA

NEWS 32 Virtualization News

Download Virtualization Journal, June 2008

PDF format, 12MB, 38Pages.

SOA and Virtualization for Improved Application Availability

Forgetting network virtualization can cost you scalability and availability

Service oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization are both top of mind in today’s IT environment, but for the enterprise architect or chief information officer, identifying how these approaches can be brought together for the benefit of the entire enterprise can be a difficult task. Adopting SOA creates expectations of higher levels of service availability and reuse in addition to the quick creation of new composite applications.

SOA most often resides in the domain of the application development group. Meanwhile, data center teams are usually first to embrace virtualization as they consolidate infrastructure for cost reduction. However, the application development platform is quickly becoming virtual, requiring enterprise architects to understand the best way to roll out SOA-based services and applications in this new virtualized environment, where any given application service may need to be accessed from around the globe.

Beyond fostering communication between the application development and data center teams, enterprise architects must grapple with mapping SOA-based systems to a virtualized data center, question where SOA and virtualization intersect, and determine how one can make optimal use of the other. ...

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The Rising Value and Power of Virtualization
BY JEREMY GEELAN

When in September of last year former Gartner analyst Theresa Lanowitz wrote here in Virtualization Journal that virtualization was “the leading technology of the 21st century,” there will have been many enterprise IT professional who perhaps thought her comment was mere hyperbole.

For all that, Lanowitz’s pronouncement came in the immediate wake of the stunning billiondollar VMware IPO, which was oversubscribed by as much as 25x the number of shares available. She certainly knew whereof she spoke.

Since then of course we’ve had Citrix buying ZenSource for $500M, which was hailed as a “great day for the virtualization market,” and Sun buying Innotek, Microsoft buying Softricity and Kidaro, VMware buying Thinstall...the list goes on.

Virtualization makes it unnecessary for average users to have to maintain a separate machine for each OS they wish to run. With virtualization, companies can buy fewer servers and manage networks more easily. That is just the beginning.

Virtualization is rewriting the rules of IT management, deployment, planning, and purchasing. Virtualization is steadily taking the cost – and even the complexity – out of IT. When EMC originally bought VMware (for $635M) back in 2003, the trade press wrote that VMware had “had some success selling its software to companies looking to consolidate several different applications onto the same physical machine, and has, of late, focused on developing management capabilities for its software.”

If more clear evidence were needed, for those who thought virtualization would be just a passing IT fancy, then I can’t think of it.

The plain fact is that virtualization is a nobrainer for medium to large companies. In today’s world, server sprawl has become a major problem and costs companies a lot of money not only in server hardware, but in power, cooling, support, and square footage. Virtualization potentially addresses all those issues.

Virtualization, as I have mentioned before in these editorials, is not a new concept. Various techniques that mirror today’s virtualization technology were used throughout the 1960s and 1970s to boost performance for shared mainframe systems. In the 1980s and 1990s, as microprocessors became ever more powerful and inexpensive and PC servers replaced mainframe and minicomputer systems, many of these techniques were put aside. Prematurely!

As it became practical and affordable to simply roll out a new server whenever IT needed, the virtualization concept was more or less retired. But now we’ve come full circle as the costs of housing, powering, cooling, and maintaining these servers have been rising and rising, creating a tremendous burden on resources.

For those of you reading this at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York, you will have a chance to see all this for yourself at the Expo. ...

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