Comments on: Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 3 – Desktop Computers

By: Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 3 « Blogging Idol … | Canada today

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:12:42 +0000

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By: Ron Van Holst

Ron Van Holst — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:57:33 +0000

Thanks for your comments Chris, you have brought up additional considerations worth noting. From my perspective, back-up was simplified because everything is encapsulated in the file. It was easier for me because I was working with diskless servers, and I was using NetApp utilities to replicate my data.

I comment on desktop computing, as I am applying my thinking about value propositions and market adoption for different classes of computing, I’m not claiming to have equal experience in all these environments.

I recognize these files can get very big and when there are many of them, a desktop computer and more so a laptop is not designed to handle that kind of data replication. It makes sense that the data to back up is multiplied, as VMs multiply the number of computing environments supported by a host. Perhaps this will be an incentive to migrate from VMs on desktops to desktop virtualization. From a data protection perspective, I really think you want replication outside of the machine, so maybe the answer is faster external connections (like USB 3.0) and better desktop back-up solutions.

When I did my work, backing up running VMs was not possible as far as I can recall, if we could do that, back-ups could be done in the background.

I’m also a fan of solid state drives. Although they are more expensive and less dense than magnetic drives, they are faster and more reliable. I would think that larger laptops would have room for duplicated solid state drives, and in this case fast replication of VMs could be supported internally.

It should be noted that for compute servers also, adding virtual machines increases the requirements on storage and IO. Not surprising then that a high end storage vendor bought VMware, eh?

By: Chris Lau

Chris Lau — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:14:31 +0000

I’ve used virtualization on a desktop for testing purposes. It’s a useful way to reset or to revert back an environment.

VMWare has really improved its product, especially with GPU acceleration support and support for USB.

One thing that gets to be difficult in managing is backups. VM’s tend to get very large, and if you have many VM’s that is a lot of backup work. This is a limiting factor for widespread adoption of VM’s on a desktop and most especially a laptop. For example, maybe it’s better to host VM on a desktop that has RAID 1 or 5, instead of on a laptop, which runs on a single drive.

If the drive goes bad the user loses everything (and running regular backups for VM’s becomes time consuming).

Do you think something as simple as USB 3.0 would speed up adoption?