Intel invests to make virtualisation mainstream

After the surprise announcement of its intention to invest in virtualisation software vendor VMware, Intel has said it has made its £110 million investment to help spur the virtualisation sector forward.

Intel yesterday announced it was buying a 2.5 stake in the software virtualisation firm, which it will take following VMware's IPO this summer. At a VMware event in London today, Arun Shenoy, director of enterprise accounts for Intel, said it's time for virtualisation to go mainstream.

"From a technology standpoint, we believe it's now reached a level of maturity," Shenoy said. "We want to invest in that, so we can accelerate their ability to go to market quickly."

Despite being a major area of growth, virtualisation is not yet a major force. As IDC analyst Chris Ingle said at the event, a survey showed that while 69 per cent of new servers bought by enterprise last year will be virtualised, that's still a total of just seven per cent of the total servers installed in business - no where near critical mass, Shenoy said.

"We want virtualisation to be the default way how infrastructure is managed in an organisation," said Shenoy. Forget resource pools, he said, right now it's more like puddles. "We'd like to get to pools, we'd like to get to the ocean - and I know that's stretching the metaphor rather thin."

By investing in what Intel considers the market leader, the firm hopes to drive forward the virtualisation sector as a whole. "Investment will significantly accelerate virtualisation from seven per cent to 10 per cent to 15 per cent, which it would do anyway, but we want to accelerate it," said Shenoy.

But in order for virtualisation to continue to grow, Shenoy said it needs proper benchmarks, better vendor support and improved migration tools.

Shenoy said that the industry needs a meaningful benchmark for customers to compare products, which he hopes a joint Intel-IBM rating project called vConsolidate will produce. Such an unbiased industry-driven benchmark will "bring a level of maturity to the discussion," he said.

Software support is another stalling point for virtualisation. Currently, some vendors don't support their products if they've been deployed on a virtual server. "It'll only be successful if VMware and Intel do a good job connecting the software and hardware," Shenoy said. "There's a gap and it's a bit too big."

VMware's regional director Lewis Gee said, if a big name vendor such as SAP doesn't support something, their customers won't follow. Overcoming vendor support issues will be the "sort of thing which that makes virtualisation a reality and pervasive," he said.

Another problem the market must overcome is migration. Despite their virtual nature, such systems have difficulties moving between different server environments. To battle this, Intel today announced its VT FlexMigration tool, which allows virtualised servers on a single processor system to migrate to a multicore enviromnment, for example. "That's something new, something very different," claimed Shenoy. "IT will significantly change how virtualisation is deployed."

However, virtualised systems still don't migrate between different core architecture systems. That means, said Gee, that a system can't move between an Intel and an AMD box.

Because of this, VMware is also in discussions with AMD, Gee said. "They're supporting the virtualisation industry, as are Intel," he said. "They don't have to be identical machines, but they do have to have the same architecture."

Having both Intel and AMD on board is good for the sector and customers, Gee said: "The more uniform it is, the better it is for us and the better it is for our customers."

Even Intel's Shenoy encouraged AMD into making migration easier in the market. "To keep their ability to play and gain in this market, they're going to need to make some choices," he said.

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