Food for thought on the discussion about virtualization and utility computing.   

Utility computing has gained considerable popularity over the past eighteen months as businesses big and small seek to take advantage of the flexibility the new computing model offers. This hasn’t always been the case, though. For a time, utility computing seemed a lackluster space that hadn’t been able to deliver on its early promise. The renewed interest comes on the heels of rapid market acceptance of server virtualization solutions like VMware and Xen.

Virtualization is commonly used for server consolidation, carving physical servers into smaller virtual machines (VM) that can be used as if they were real servers. However, to accomplish this virtualization creates a separation of hardware and software, decoupling virtual machine images from physical assets. Users of virtualization have come to accept that virtual machine images can be moved among servers in their data center, so it’s a logical progression for them to think about running them on external resources – utility computing. Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that Xen, an open source virtualization system, is the foundation for more than one commercial utility computing system.

Virtualization by itself, however, is not a complete utility computing solution. While virtualization systems deal exceptionally well with partitioning CPU and memory within a server, they lack abstractions for network and storage interactions, image management, life-cycle control and other services critical to utility computing. However, there are two commercial utility computing solutions based on virtualization that are more than a year old now, Amazon’s EC2 and 3tera’s AppLogic.

Therefore, we can start to evaluate the required elements of a successful utility computing solution based on those services. The rest of this article is a list of services required beyond virtualization in order to build a utility computing system.

The article lists the following needs for utility computing: Storage, Network Virtualization, Scheduling, Image Management, VM Configuration, IP Address Allocation, and Monitoring/High Availability along with a few other side notes.

Check it out, read the entire FishTrain article, here.