Virtualization in Datacenters

In today’s post we are going to talk about the presentation that Raul Coria , Cloud Product Manager at IPM , gave last Tuesday (March 5^th 2019) at La Salle about how Virtualization has changed Datacenters.

Evolution of Datacenters

According to Raul, the evolution of Datacenters can be categorized into three stages, pertaining to three diferent types of datacenters.

• The first datacenters: Comprised of a series of servers, each with an operating system that provides for one service.

• The datacenters of yesterday: Type that aims to separate servers in the fundamental parts that conform them(computing, storage, networking, etc.) in order to create specialized and connected structures (storage network, etc.). Devices such as Blade Servers, Storage Cabins and Unified Switches are examples of components of these datacenters.

• The datacenters of today: Datacenters that use virtualization. In this case, the physical structure loses relevance.

Virtualization

Virtualization can be seen as the act of unlinking software and hardware, of adding a layer of abstraction between both (usually an hypervisor). In other words, virtualization offers the possibility of lifting the restrictions in software born from the structure (hardware) that houses it:  virtualization is flexibility.

This flexibility allows for the appearance of certain properties, capabilities and functionalities.

Functionalities (centered on VMware):

• vMotion & Storage vMotion
• Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• Distributed Power Management (DPM)
• vStorage Provisioning
• Others: vComputing, vNetwork , etc.

Capabilities & Properties:

• Advanced fault tolerance
• Scaling up and out more easily
• Others

Having said that, Raul Coria continued by making special emphasis in the complete virtualization of a datacenter: Software Defined Datacenters.

Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

The complete virtualization of a datacenter requires the complete virtualization of its corresponding areas. Amongst those, we find:

• Software Defined Networking (SDN): Any networking device (switch, router, etc.) can be virtualized. In fact, the whole network can be represented through software: NSX is the VMware implementation. Thanks to this virtualization some concepts, such as Microsegmentation, can be found.
• Software Defined Storage (SDS): Created with an idea similar to that of SDN.  vSAN (Virtual SAN) is the VMWare implementation.

As a consequence of being software defined, creating interfaces like vRealize (contains vRealize Ops), which can manage SDDCs on the whole (and much more) , is doable.

Finally, Raul also talked about how virtualization affects end user computing (particulary in the digitalization of the workspace), and about a concept that might be the future of datacenters, hyperconvergence.