Fundamentals: Application Virtualization
Fundamentals: Application Virtualization
The evolution of virtualization—from a way to more efficiently use hardware into a whole new application platform variously known as the cloud, IaaS or PaaS—has exposed complexities in application distribution and management that we couldn’t have imagined in the days of disposable disk images. Today, the job of configuring virtualized applications is incredibly complex—never mind maintaining them across multiple VM instances on an increasingly diverse array of hardware, hypervisor platforms and cloud services. All these are now application endpoints, and each demands different tools and interfaces for configuration and ongoing administration.
Furthermore, as IT has gained comfort with their virtualized infrastructures, the range of production applications deployed thereon has grown large and complex. Out: a few Windows development and test servers. In: multitier, mission-critical enterprise applications. As a result, flaws in the longstanding practice of distributing VM disk images as virtual application appliances are coming to the fore. While these golden images are a great way to quickly deploy a new machine, they quickly diverge from their pristine initial condition in the wilds of daily use. Furthermore, they don’t always work across different hypervisor or public IaaS platforms. A similar problem afflicts system managers trying to configure and instantiate virtualized resources, like compute cores, memory, networks and storage, on different hardware platforms in a repeatable fashion.
In an ideal world, application and infrastructure requirements could be abstractly expressed in a machine-readable meta-format that IT could use to automatically configure and deploy instances on a variety of virtualized platforms, both private and public. We’re still a long way from this cross-platform, “configure once, deploy anywhere” vision, but vendors across the virtualization ecosystem are chipping away at various pieces of the problem.
In this InformationWeek Fundamentals report, we’ll walk you through the problems surrounding application virtualization, provide some context and a framework for understanding the various approaches to solving them, and present an overview of the products and technologies that can decouple the configuration and management of virtualized applications from their physical manifestations. (S3721111)
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
6 Application Virtualization Macro Trends
6 Figure 1: Use of Virtualization Technologies
7 Figure 2: Planned Virtualization
8 Segmenting the Problem
9 Figure 3: Servers Hosting VMs in Production
10 Infrastructure Orchestration
11 Figure 4: Private Cloud Use
12 Application Bundling
12 Figure 5: Use of Virtualization Hosting Platforms
13 Figure 6: Single vs. Multiple Hypervisors
14 Private vs. Public Cloud Tools
15 Figure 7: Importance of Virtualization Features
16 Figure 8: Use of VM Mobility Tool
17 Familiar Problems
18 Related Reports
About the Author
Kurt Marko is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran, pursuing his passion for communications after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, Kurt spent several years as a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and simulation developer.
Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in the laser printer R&D lab doing electrophotography development, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join HP’s nascent technical IT group. He spent 15 years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprisewide infrastructure projects at HP, including the Windows domain infrastructure, remote access service, Exchange e-mail infrastructure and managed Web services.
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