Page 99 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

JUST O V ER THE HORIZON, PRIV ATE CL OUDS

the economies that they’re reading about in public clouds.
Those that have built up skills in x86 servers and built out pools
of virtualized servers will be able to answer yes, it is.
The next step would be to acquire the layer of virtualiza-
tion management software to overlay the pool, provide moni-
toring and management tools, and give yourself automated

ways of load balancing and migrating virtual machines
around.
VMware is leading the field with its vSphere 4 infrastruc-
ture package and vCenter management tools. In fact, vCenter
can provide a view of the virtualized servers as a pooled re-
source, as if they were one giant computer, and manage them
as a unit, although there is a limit to the number of physical

servers one vCenter management console can cover. Citrix
Systems’ XenSource unit, the Virtual Iron part of Oracle, and
Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager product
can do many of these things as well.
A manager using vSphere 4 and vCenter can track what
virtual machines are running, what jobs they’re doing, and the
percentage of their host server that is fully utilized. By moving
virtual machines around from physical server to physical server,
the data center manager can balance the workload, move vir-

tual machines to servers that have spare capacity, and shut
down servers that aren’t needed to save energy.
Moving to a private cloud may not necessarily be a goal at
many business data centers. But many of the fundamental
trends driving efficient computing will point them in that di-
rection anyway. Those who have built out an x86 data center
and organized it as a virtualized pool will be well positioned to

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