Everyone has ideas of where virtualization is heading, what it will look like, and how everything’s moving to cloud computing. I’ve pretty much built our internal cloud, and it’s somewhat limited to PaaS, with a move to include SaaS. I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and virtualization overall over the next two years.
Feel free to shoot me an email, luke at thephuck.com, or on twitter @thephuck. I’d like to gather everyone’s ideas and responses to build another collaborative post. I was going to build a survey, but I like discussions a lot better than a form to fill out. This is geared more towards the IT/IS shop with a decent investment in virtualization, but not a hosting company. My production environment alone is roughly 100 hosts spread across about 14 clusters in four different geophysical locations. I don’t really expect the smaller shops with ~50 hosts in one or two DCs to expand how we did.
I personally feel the virtualization stack as it has been known is going to be less visible in the future, due to internal clouds. It’s not really viewed as having an ESXi host to put VMs on, rather than a cluster where VMs live and move around freely. We’ll be less concerned with building hosts as we did traditionally, and will do a lot more stateless builds where a rip & replace is done very easily. That’s pretty much done today.
Some of my concerns are the underlying hardware, fewer larger boxes (16-32 cores & 512GB of RAM) versus more smaller boxes. I currently deploy with 256GB of RAM and that gets me near 50:1 with RAM being my limitation in a 2 pCPU box. We’re a VMware shop, so I don’t see a shift to Hyper-V for me, but maybe others? Nothing wrong with it, just this is the path we chose. That being said, I haven’t really had a chance to get into VCD, and I believe that’s a route we need to go down as well if you want a more fluid/automated cloud.
I find myself doing a lot of day to day maintenance, or focusing on short-term goals, and often lose sight of the road that’s way ahead. I can see what’s down the road in front of me, but what about down the road, around the bend, and to the left?
TIA!