Mike D’s Blog

I recently came across a blog post from Cassatt saying that virtualization isn’t required for the cloud. What a stupid topic I thought to myself. Of course it’s required. After reading through the post (which was well written) I thought that I’ve been in the virtualization space for so long that maybe I’m missing something. Then I started to think about the cloud implementations that I’m currently doing with 3 of the largest service providers in the world. Sure all of them have virtual and physical servers. All of them have lots of other devices (networking, storage, security, etc) in the datacenter as well. Do you really need to virtualize everything in order to stand up a cloud? The answer is no. What is this? A VMware person saying you don’t need virtualization? If you’re my boss then stop and read on before you fire me.

The main purpose of cloud computing in my mind is to get people concentrating on the core job of IT – get business data to the user. You shouldn’t have to care about all of the crap in the middle of those two things. Before IT you still had the same issue only the data was in a file cabinet and the user would simply walk over to the cabinet to get the data. IT entered the picture and through many iterations made it to where I could get the data while sitting in my comfy office chair without having to pass by and interact with other human beings. The problem now is that IT has gotten so entrenched with the widgets and gadgets between my comfy chair and the data that they’ve grown costs through the roof to the point where they’re the second largest cost to a company behind salaries. Why have we moved so far off the path of data to user?

Enter virtualization to the rescue. Virtualization has one purpose in life – abstract things. That’s all it does. It doesn’t matter if it’s VLANs in the network or storage virtualization or virtual firewalls or virtual machines. They all abstract away the underlying hardware so you don’t have to worry about it. Just think of having to put physical firewalls everywhere that virtual firewalls service today. That would be a major pain. Instead we’ve moved towards FaaS (firewalls as a service). You simply log into a neat little interface and create a firewall in a self service type of fashion. Pretty cool, huh? Same goes for the rest of the infrastructure services. In fact virtualization IS the key enabler that will allow us to get to a true “I Don’t Care” cloud world and get back to the data to user business.

Now you could keep going down the road of bringing every technology know to man into the datacenter and then going out and getting something like a Cassatt to try and figure out how to talk to all of it. The alternative is just to abstract it all away and just worry about talking to the abstraction layer. Personally I like the later and not just because I work for VMware but just think about having to write a common cloud API to thousands of devices versus just a handful of virtualization layers. Think about the proven benefits of virtualization that’s already in datacenters. Why wouldn’t you want to virtualize? To be honest the hold outs at this point are just people that don’t really understand technology, people that are trying to hold onto their jobs for dear life, or people selling something that virtualization will make obsolete. It’s funny when you go and visit customers every day and meet these people because usually when you go back in a few months those people are gone from the company.

In conclusion, sure you don’t *need* virtualization to make a cloud just like you don’t *need* a car to commute to work in Atlanta – it just will take you longer and be that much more painful to get to the end point without either.