Seeing as how this weekend marks USA's 4th of July, and in patriotic fashion, I'll quote part of our Declaration of Independence. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of 100% Virtualized.
As a vitualization admin, we have the tendancy to try and virtualize everything we can get our hands on. Whether it's NT4, Linux, Oracle, SQL, Exchange, Domino, SAP, etc. nothing stands that can't be virtualized in our minds. Thus, alot of us share the common goal to pursue a 100% virtualized datacenter.
Let's take a look at the real world. Gartner published an article that said "only 18 percent of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized; the number is expected to grow to more than 50 percent by the close of 2012". There are reports that around 30% of all servers have been virtualized at the present moment. Quite frankly, I'm not surprised. If you happen to work in an enterprise with thousands of servers, I think it will be a few years before you can even see the light at the end of the tunnel. If the trend continues, I believe we could very well see 50% by the end of 2012, and even perhaps 90% by the end of 2014 or 2015.
Currently, I'm sitting at an 85% virtualized server infrastructure, but that goes without saying my environment is very small. 2 more servers stop me on my road map to having a 100% virtualized server infrastructure. Our Lotus Domino mail server is slated to be done here in the next month or so and then we have our IBM FileNet server. We use IBM FileNet is an imaging solution to archive important documents that can't be lost or destroyed. In addition, all of these documents are auditable, therefore, transactions must be written to WORM media. We don't have a budget for a nice WORM archiving system, so currently we have a HP Optical WORM drive connected via SCSI to that physical server where all the transactions can be written. How am i going to overcome this? The only solution I found was to possibly implement Starwind's iSCSI Initiator to turn the device into an iSCSI device and send the data over TCP/IP. What I'm trying to say here is that there are workarounds for alot of situations. Do some out of the box thinking and there might be ways to virtualize the impossible.
Virtualization is a proven technology. It's been embraced and it's very difficult for vendors to give a reason why a server can't be virtualized. We all strive for a 100% virtualized server infrastructure, but at the same time, we're already looking at virtualizing desktops. It feels like 100% may never be an attainable goal. It's sort of like have a twinkie dangled in front of you; you can't reach it, but you won't stop going for it.
Virtualized workloads will play a key role when it's time to move on from the private and into the public cloud. I'm not saying the public cloud is the finish line because there will never be an "end-goal" and we can say our job is complete. The first step in getting to where we will all be someday, all starts with a P2V.