Novell's Richard Whitehead and I sat down to a lively discussion on the trials and tribulations of VM management. Whitehead was good enough to remind me of Novell's open source chops on SUSE and Xen...
I'm the first to admit that Novell doesn't come immediately to mind when thinking of the virtualization market. Then again, it has wholeheartedly embraced open source, released a supported SUSE-based Xen offering 18 months ago, and is pretty darn good at integrating NetWare, Microsoft, and Linux solutions.
While Whitehead and I worked hard to keep our Friday morning chat platform-independent for an upcoming piece on VM management concerns, a number of noteworthy points surfaced around Novell's history in this area and the company's recent acquisition of PlateSpin.
First up is the obligatory data blurb: Novell surveys revealed that its customer data centers are running at an average 15% resource utilization. Sound familiar to anyone else out there? When asked about motivators for virtualization, the No. 1 customer driver was to reduce physical space, No. 2 was cost reduction. Informally, many of Novell's enterprise customers are in the same boat as the rest of us; virtualization snuck into the enterprise via IT test labs and was quickly leveraged into production for all the standard reasons.
That rush to VM production often leaves the enterprise struggling with virt server "sprawl."
Personally, I'm feeling like we're back in the early '90s, deaaling with x86 server sprawl and lack of management discipline. Chargeback? Accurate inventories?
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