Virtualization - Part 1: What is Virtualization and do I need it?

This article reminds me of a little boy who went to his father with a question, to which his father replied "Son, why don't you go ask your mom?" Knowing all too well this outcome, the little boy answered in exasperation, " Because, I didn't really want to know that much!"

The buzzword of "Virtualization" may just be this kind of subject for you. But more and more service providers are doing some kind of virtualization, so you might want to at least have a conceptual view.

In all honesty, I think some service providers virtualize infrastructures to make them so complicated that the school is held virtually captive (pun intended) and fearful of trying to manage the systems for fear they will disappear into thin air. Which, come to think of it, is actually quite possible...

Let's try to reduce the concept of virtualization sufficient to enable a decision about the technology and if it is right for you. Be patient this will take a few articles.

A virtual computer is a digital representation of another fully functional computer (the guest), which resides inside of a physical computer (the host). Wikipedia defines it thus: A virtual machine (VM) is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system".

Virtualization evolved from a fundamental economic requirement to reduce the cost of buying, housing, powering, and securing (think backups) of computers; mainly server class computers. It has been an exceptionally profitable undertaking.

I recall visiting one data center, and this was not a small single story building, with floors and floors of nothing but server computers. On a given floor there were rows and rows of racks filled with stacks of server computers, probably numbering in the thousands of actual physical servers, normally in a "blade" form factor so they could put more servers in a given rack.

There was an entire staff of network engineers moving through the rows doing some sort of maintenance, upgrades, or complete replacements. It was actually quite impressive, along with being very noisy and uncomfortably warm.

If I were to revisit that facility today, I would expect to see 75% less space being used to accomplish the same mission. Instead of thousands of servers, there might be hundreds. But, each of those servers would be running 10 Virtual Servers, delivering an equivalent in computing capacity.

Virtualization allows companies to dramatically reduce the cost of real estate, hardware, electricity, heating and cooling, and administration of data centers - (roughly in that order of savings). It is a mature and well established industry, with a few key software companies owning most of the market share. The solutions of which I am familiar are VMWare and Microsoft.

What is really cool, if you are a Geek, is that you can actually store an "image" of a virtual machine on a computer hard drive and launch it into action at a moments notice. When you do so, it's like magic - "poof"; and another fully functional computer appears on your network. This Virtual Disk Image (VMWare) or Virtual Hard Drive (Microsoft) can be moved easily to any host capable of powering it up.

Virtual machines have opened up all kinds of possibilities in managing technology at your school. But they are not without cost and may not always be practical in your particular situation. Proceed with care and it may save you a bundle, proceed carelessly and it may cost you your job when everything blows up

We'll explore a few of these ideas in the coming weeks.

Note: I am not an expert in either VMWare or Microsoft Hyper-V, leaders of virtual machine technology. This is not indended to be technical document, rather an overview for our many Charter School Administrators who  may really not want to know that much!