The Virtual Data Center

I am the king of starting blog posts with “I know, it’s been a while…” So I’ll dispense with that intro here and get right to the goods.

I’ve been traveling a fair amount lately, speaking on the impact virtualization has on your applications, and talking to customers about their current virtualization issues. As you know I typically talk about the virtual platforms: hypervisors, resource management, virtual networking, and how all of that trickles up the stack to your applications. In other words: What happens to my web app when I move my web farm from physical servers to virtual servers?

More and more my conversations have been moving from concepts around introducing virtualization into the data center and towards how to efficiently use virtualization in the data center. The difference here is subtle in verbiage but huge in impact: customers are saying and showing that they understand, trust, and are standardizing on virtualization technologies and now they’re attacking deployment of these technologies. We’ve moved beyond the whiteboard phase and now we’re into the data center. For those keen on the 4Ds, we’re past Define and Design and now somewhere in the midst of Develop and Deploy. This may seem like old news to people who live and breath virtualization every day, but to customers who are not early adopters or bleeding technology implementers, this movement is a huge step for the virtual data center.

The key litmus test I’ve used for this evaluation is how frequently I talk about architecture. Last year I spent all my time talking about virtualization technologies, the challenges they introduce into the physical data center, and how to start planning to adequately manage those challenges and migrating to a truly dynamic virtual data center. I talked plumbing. Today I’m talking much more about how to architect virtualization technologies in the data center; how to use these tools as building blocks for service delivery (the real reason we use data centers in the first place). And those architecture conversations have likewise changed scope, moving from talk about how to add virtualization to the data center to talk about how to build the data center around the dynamic nature of virtualization. Oh yes, I’m talking dynamic infrastructure (or Infrastructure 2.0 as it’s been called for a while) conversations with IT architects. Awesome.

And while it may be an obvious and slight change in perception from those of us who are looking at virtualization 2-3 years down the road, we can’t forget about what a drastic leap it is for data center architects who are building applications and systems that have to be reliable. Services that are re-sold; applications that provide a business presence; 5 9’s SLAs that are dependent on virtual platforms.

Paradigm shifts are often subtle because we’re looking from inside. When viewed from the outside, though, the dynamic data center is finally coming to fruition, and the implementers – the customers — are the leading the way. We’ve built the rollercoaster; now let’s try out that exhilarating first drop.