Wednesday, October 29, 2008

virtually limited

The buzz about virtualization isn't quite deafening yet. We do have much to be excited about. I'm particularly geeked up about the possibility of bleeding our PCs white with a virtual desktop environment. My initial concerns have had to do with performance.

In an informative briefing given by one of the ITS gurus (he's actually a brilliant technologist), I got a hint of a pending performance breakthrough. It was my understanding that performance in virtualized environments is bottlenecked because a single VM can only use four vCPUs. My understanding was that adding virtual guests when the VM has access to a single vCPU dimishes the guest's performance. However, it was mentioned in the informative briefing that this limitation is about to change. Apparently, even with the current four vCPU limitation, the lastest versions of the four most popular virtualization technologies (they'll remain nameless because I'm just not in the mood) are all meeting or exceeding performance requirements with six VMs running with one vCPU allocated per VM.

I'm feeling better already about a 47% hardware/software line item reduction.

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