A must-read article from Kevin Lawton, self-proclaimed “pioneer in x86 virtualization, serial entrepreneur, business and technology visionary, prolific idea creator, news and business book junkie”.
The full article is here, but we give you an excerpt:
To get to where virtualization needs to go, we need to be able to look at virtualization as a fabric, stretching or overlaying numerous physical sites. And Cloud Computing will absolutely exacerbate this need. Many things that we’ve contemplated on a small scale (e.g. load balancing, power management, down-time maintenance), need to be brought to a larger context of a virtualization fabric stretching across physical sites. Virtualization needs to stretch to the cloud. To be sure, there are a number of issues to solve to make this happen, including networking and storage continuity. But I’d like to present a part of this next evolutionary step, virtualization 3.0, which is critical to its success yet unanswered elsewhere to my knowledge.
Memory density in servers continues to go up following its own exponential path. And as virtualization is used for increasingly higher-end workloads, the size of per-VM memory will continue to rise. Just imagine if you piled up all the RAM from all of your data centers, in one spot! Yet, to enable a fluid and dynamic virtualization 3.0 fabric, we need to rapidly allow all kinds of intra and inter-site VM migrations to occur, often driven automatically. That requires a whole new approach to how we manage VM memory; huge volumes of it effectively need to be transported rapidly. On the storage front, there are a number of technologies afoot, which are enablers of virtualization 3.0. But, I’ve been working for some time on concepts for making VM memory a 1st class citizen of the virtualization 3.0 vision.
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