Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Bill Pedersen, VP Engineering at Stromasys
Clever Architectural Mapping and Expansion of Host Environments are Mandatory in Cross-Platform Virtualization Market
Predictions or forecasts are at best poorly focused visions
through a cloudy pane of glass. The computing and virtualization
technologies are constantly changing. Open source software and hardware are
only contributing to increase the rate of acceleration.
Whether you look at the classic homogeneous virtualization
environment or cross-platform virtualization, such as Stromasys' Charon product
lines, you see forces pushing the technology to its limits, and the application
of new technologies pushing the limits further. Compute platforms are being
leveraged to virtualize the remainder of the information technology
infrastructure. Network switches, network adapters, storage controllers,
and storage devices are all being virtualized on common compute hardware.
Much of this leads to new trends in virtualization, and is
being driven by cost: energy costs, real estate costs, system utilization costs
(the cost of money). Some of the trends are also being driven by the need
for flexibility and adaptability in the marketplace-software code is much easier
to adapt than silicon-therefore competition acts as a powerful component
igniting the trends in virtualization.
Among other factors influencing the trends of virtualization,
there are efforts to improve availability, disaster recovery support, load balancing,
and resource capacity management. These factors are the same for classic,
homogeneous virtualization, as well as cross-platform virtualization.
There are certain virtualization trends that are gaining
momentum in the cross-platform virtualization market, including smart
architectural mapping. More and more we are seeing hardware that is being
enhanced to facilitate virtualization.
Whether it is in the form of extensions to closed hardware
architectures-Intel's virtualization extensions, for example-or from open
source hardware, such as ARM, the effect is the same: more capable and higher
performance virtual platform implementations. This is fairly straightforward
for the homogeneous virtualization market, at least in the x86/x64 architectures.
The cross-platform virtualization market will continue with improvements based
upon clever architectural mapping, and instruction set emulation and
translation.
Charon products currently implement virtual equivalents of the
PDP, VAX, and Alpha machine architectures originally developed by Digital
Equipment Corporation. Additionally, Charon now has virtual equivalents
of HP 3000 PA-RISC and Sun Sparc architectures. These changes have
evolved from being initially applied on Windows as a host environment,
supporting multiple virtual machine instances. Now these features are also
being supported on Linux host systems and on VMware/Vsphere hypervisor
environments. There have been also modifications on other hypervisors and
on cloud platforms, including Amazon and Datapipe. We continue to expand
our universe of architectures and host environments.
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About the Author
Bill Pedersen is Vice
President of Engineering at Stromasys, where he oversees the complete range of
Charon emulator products as well as new product development. He has more than
35 years of experience managing, implementing, supporting, and training for
OpenVMS, including managing the OpenVMS Boot Camp.