Virtualisation in the cloud era
The early years
My first exposure to virtualisation came back in 2007. My multinational corporate client had been trialling VMware for a year or so and I was asked to scope and manage a European Data Centre Migration, with a view to refreshing operating systems (OS), databases and hardware, and to consolidate as much as possible using both VMware and Solaris containers.
Back then the differences in approach of the two technologies was an intriguing side-story. Running a ‘full-fat’ operating system was seen to be ‘safer’ than the OS-shared model in Solaris – although containerisation was the more efficient approach. The debate was a little academic: both worked well and both offered a way to massively improve on the hardware utilisation rates seen across datacentres at the time.
For databases, we deployed different cluster technologies and trusted the database engines (SQL-Server, Oracle) to handle resource sharing between database instances. We chose not to run databases on virtualisation layers for both architectural and licensing reasons. To this day I have an aversion to running databases on top of a hypervisor, although I have seen it done, successfully, at many clients!
Of course, virtualisation and containerisation was not new even then, with time-sharing featuring on mainframes since the 1970s. But the ‘server-sprawl’ that came with cheap(er) x86 architectures was new and virtualisation promised to help tame it.
Cloud model
Fast-forward 15 years and once again I’m leading a large-scale migration for a large multinational. This time we’re moving from seven on-premise datacentres around the globe to a public cloud provider. Of course, in the cloud, virtualisation is fundamental.
In the intervening years, VMware evolved considerably, became the industry standard for consolidating workloads, and with owner Dell/EMC, has helped to establish hyper-converged infrastructure as a model for on-premise compute.
VMware also tried (and failed) to establish their own public cloud services, and then pivoted; announcing a complete re-write, based, somewhat ironically, on containers. Because whilst Solaris is now just a footnote, containers have won increasing support.
VMware has been available on AWS for some time, and was recently made available on Microsoft Azure too. When discussing this at my client, architects and operations leads both echoed my reaction: it’s largely an irrelevance in the cloud.
As with my aversion to running databases on VMWare back in the late 2000s, I do not see the long-term value of running VMWare on public cloud infrastructure that is already operating native virtualisation. In my opinion it will add cost and complexity with little additional value.
The single exception is a short-term use-case to support rapid migration and cloud adoption. If your on-premise estate runs on VMWare, then it should be relatively straightforward to establish a VMware farm in the cloud and quickly move workloads off-premise to allow corporate datacentres to be closed. That should be just the first step in an optimisation programme that moves to more cloud-native architectures. Don’t be surprised to see a large jump in costs if you don’t complete that journey.
The future
It may be too early to write VMware off completely but I do predict a period of decline as increasingly the corporate world shifts to cloud from on-premise datacentres. Dell has sensed this too, as it looks likely that VMware will be spun off into a separate company later this year. Quite what VMware does next remains to be seen.
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