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Virtualization Everywhere!



Lots of news on Virtualization. The need to effectively put Virtualization to use in the production environment is really growing.

Look for yourself what Pfizer is doing.

Pfizer aims to make 14 WebLogic application servers (running on 14 hardware servers in the data center) into a single virtualized resource by the end of this month using Cassatt's Collage grid management software and the vendor's recently unveiled Web Automation Module. Under the module's virtualization capabilities, Pfizer business apps will not necessarily run with the application server on the same piece of physical hardware where the application is located. Apps encountering the most demand will get application server services from wherever they are underutilized across the server set.

Running Cassatt's Collage and Web Automation Module "will allow us to manage our WebLogic environment as if it were one machine," even though it's spread across multiple servers, says Richard Lynn, VP of global applications and architecture. That way, Pfizer can shift WebLogic resources from one set of applications to another or remotely fire up more WebLogic servers to handle additional traffic, when needed.

If the first phase works as expected, Pfizer will bring another 86 servers under Cassatt software management by the end of the year. Pfizer also uses VMware virtualization software, and by the end of 2007, 500 servers will be utilized in a virtual mode, using either Cassatt or VMware's technology.

Pfizer will extend virtualization beyond its core business applications running under WebLogic to include portal servers and portal apps. In addition, the 500 servers will run Oracle database and application software; IBM DataStage data extraction, transformation, and loading software for Pfizer's data warehouse; Microsoft Windows Server applications; and WebLogic's Java apps, Lynn says.

The benefit of managing a grid of servers and the middleware they support using virtualization now seems obvious to Lynn. "We would need at least double the 500 servers if we weren't running Collage and VMware," he says.


Imagine, 14 Weblogic app servers! 14 of them!!! And we're talking about another 500 Servers that will undergo the surgical virtualization by 2007! WAM is used for Java Virtualization and here Cassatt is playing a rather big role. Well talking about pooled resources, soon we will have


  • packaged
  • pooled
  • distributable
  • replicable
  • transferable
appliances (when I'm talking about appliances, I mean even a regular 32 node Oracle RAC db somewhere on the web with nodes spread apart talking to eachother via a private dark fiber running 100 Gbps).

In another news, Redhat shows off the Xen integration (which by the way they talked long time back as well, its just hot again as everyone is talking about it). Fedora Core 5 is already giving the users a taste of the the virtualization integration (among others like a built in java stack, eclipse etc etc).

While HP is talking at great lengths about its Disaster recovery scenario.


On the virtualization side, HP unveiled new toolkits for its Virtual Server Environment (VSE) product, which it claims will let users slash the time spent on virtualization projects involving software from BEA, Oracle, SAP, and IBM. According to HP execs, a typical VSE implementation with BEA's WebLogic offering, that would have previously taken up to 34 weeks to complete, can now be deployed in seven weeks or less.


VMware is going to rock the storage world and watch out for EMC , while we talk about HP, IBM and others. There might be some crazy things cooking up in the trenches.
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