IBM aims to standardize virtualization management
Published:08-July-2005
By BR staff writer
IBM Corp is planning to launch a collaboration program for virtualization technologies that will make it easier for users to manage virtualization technologies from multiple vendors, ComputerWire has learned.
Details of the plan are thin on the ground, but Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive for IBM systems and technology group, said the company saw the need to generate agreed standards that would allow users to manage complex virtualized environments.
"All of the base hardware platforms are going to have some kind of virtualization capability, so you'll be able to manage physical resources without having people manage them," Zeitler told ComputerWire. "Beyond that, you'll see a set of services to do things like workload management, prioritization, security..."
"A set of standards are going to emerge because that's what people really want," he added. "We think this is a very critical part of allowing customers to move forward. If you just have products that work with your own products you're not really helping your customers."
Zeitler said the company will make an announcement in the next two weeks to clarify its position, but it appears that an attempt to define a set of standards with other industry players is in the works.
"I think we can aggressively deliver leadership on the underlying virtualization technology, and work with standards organizations to define the interfaces of how you activate these things and get others to stand up as part of a program," he said.
"If you have market leaders who are prepared to collaborate in an open way you'll get what becomes a de facto standard," he continued, indicating that the plan might not be to go to a standards organization. "We have our own roadmap but the exciting part is where there's multiple vendors involved."
There are now multiple virtualization efforts going on across the IT industry, including processor- and software-based developments in the desktop and server space, as well as storage and network virtualization.
In the desktop and server space alone IBM has its own processor-based virtualization technologies, while Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc are working on their respective VT and Pacifica processor-based virtualization technologies.
Meanwhile, EMC Corp, SWSoft Inc, and Microsoft Corp offer PC and server-based virtual machine technology, while XenSource Inc is gaining traction with its open source Xen hypervisor product, and Microsoft last week confirmed plans to integrate hypervisor technology into Windows.
Zeitler said the importance of agreed standards across these technologies is growing as users attempt to manage multiple virtualized environments as a single compute resource. "We believe we have a leadership position in the underlying technology, we are turning our attention to make sure we have world-class virtualization management services," he said.
"Traditionally with virtualization you take a big thing and make it into lots of small things, it's equally important to do it the other way around," he said, noting that the company had learnt from experience with BladeCenter the importance of managing other devices, such as storage and switch devices. "A product like BladeCenter makes you realize it's not going to be all of one person's products. You need to have a common way of addressing those things, provisioning those things, and managing those things."
