Page 77 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

VIRTUALIZATION C HANGES EVERYTHING

sible for a practiced implementer, such as Accenture, to run
upward of 120 virtual machines per server, and probably
more. And if Accenture can do it, so can the cloud providers.
The x86 architecture is thus being put in a commanding
position to dominate cloud computing, if ways can be found
to automate the management of large numbers of x86 ma-

chines at one time.
Having multiplied the productivity of such servers, virtu-
alization weighs in again in providing the means to manage
large numbers of servers from a single console. This is an-
other match-up with the needs of the cloud. For example, if a
virtual machine has been assigned a “virtual” CPU, one giga-
byte of memory, and 33 percent of a network interface card

(an I/O device that plugs into a server to manage its network
traffic), these resources might be sufficient to keep a small
Web site running smoothly while being hosted in the cloud.
But what if something unexpected happens and traffic builds
on the site beyond any level envisioned, as happened with
Sony Music’s Michael Jackson store? It would be possible to
quickly double or triple the resources of the virtual machine
by taking them from the unused portion of the host server. Or
a management system could move other virtual machines off

the server to free up those resources, a process called live mi-
gration. To their end users, the virtual machines appear to
continue running even as they’re being moved, making it eas-
ier for managers to react to traffic spikes by moving VMs
around. As another alternative, the virtual machine manager
could decide to move the virtual machine that was starving for
more CPU to a different physical server where more cycles

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