Think of a leaner data center and one word comes to mind—Virtualization. A widely-discussed technology, Virtualization has often been the weapon of choice in the battle against costs waged by organizations. While this approach has been popular both in theory and practice, only a fraction of the global server population is actually virtualized.

Most analyst reports state that though Virtualization is hugely popular on the IT scenario, only around 12 to 15 percent of global servers are virtualized. Most data centers are still running on non-virtualized, underutilized infrastructure.

Obviously, there are challenges preventing Virtualization from going past the proof-of-concept level across many organizations. With issues ranging from capital investment to the management of a virtualized infrastructure, most organizations have taken a cautious approach to adopting Virtualization. Some companies have virtualized their testing and development environments, while others have put some of their non-core applications on a virtualized infrastructure.

To virtualize or not to virtualize
Though end users or employees in organizations are not affected by the move from a non-virtualized to a virtualized environment, Virtualization entails a substantial amount of training for personnel managing a virtualized infrastructure. This approach reduces the amount of management required for physical hardware. However, consolidating a large count of servers into a smaller number increases complexities at different layers within the virtualized infrastructure. It is these complexities that create a bottleneck for most organizations looking to move to a virtualized infrastructure.

“Virtualization is a complex technology. Both implementation and ongoing operations along with continual performance tuning and management require technical sophistication in the organization. As an overall average across the industry, there is a lack of such technical capability to deploy Virtualization the right way,” says Satish Joshi, Executive VP, Patni Computer Systems.

Further, applications that are traditionally built to run on a non-virtualized infrastructure may or may not run equally well on a virtualized infrastructure. These applications might require re-writing or re-configuring so that they can be run seamlessly on a virtualized infrastructure.

Licensing issues constitute another challenge for companies considering adopting this approach. Today, many vendors do not have clear licensing models for their offerings in a virtualized environment. There are still ambiguities in terms of the factors on which vendors base their licensing costs in a virtualized environment. This has slowed down the rate of migration of organizations from a non-virtualized to a virtualized environment.

Virtualization in India
Given such challenges, Virtualization is yet to cover large ground in the Indian IT scenario. It is more feasible for large organizations to adopt Virtualization since they have the financial bandwidth to invest in the required hardware, in the virtualization layer, in applications and corresponding licensing costs.

Consequently, Virtualization has been adopted by organizations typically belonging to the large enterprise segment. A few medium-size organizations have virtualized some portion of the IT infrastructure. Most adoptions have been on the server side, with a few organizations consolidating their storage with Virtualization technologies.

Due to its potential challenges, few companies have taken Virtualization to their production environments, and mostly have deployed their non-core applications on a virtualized environment. Virtualization has found acceptance largely in the BFSI, IT and ITeS segments. Due to the scale of its operations, the BFSI segment requires the kind of technology that will allow it to upscale or downscale as and when required. For the IT and ITeS segments, Virtualization provides the kind of ad hoc environment required for staging testing and development projects.

Other verticals that have adopted Virtualization include telecom, manufacturing and retail. VMware, one of the largest flagship Virtualization vendors, has a place on the Virtualization world map. The company’s customers include Mahindra & Mahindra, Atrenta India, BPCL, Chitale Dairy, i2 Technologies, Macawber Beekay, Religare, Bajaj Auto and Essel Propack. For Essel Propack, adopting Virtualization has allowed the company to bring down its physical server requirement from 22 to six. In the case of Bajaj Auto, Virtualization has helped the company reduce the number of racks required from four to one and improve server availability by up to 99 percent.

The Indian market is composed of a large SMB population. Such companies are cost-sensitive and have operations running on a smaller scale than those of the large enterprises. Given the upfront costs involved in buying Virtualization-ready hardware, the virtualization layer, application licensing etc, the cost of adopting a virtualized infrastructure poses a bigger challenge than a non-virtualized infrastructure.

Speaking about the hesitation of the SMB segment in adopting Virtualization, Joshi of Patni says, “For the benefits of Virtualization to be realized and become sizeable, the scale of existing investments in computing technology also matters. There is a trade-off point in Virtualization and if the scale of computing needs is below this trade-off point, Virtualization will not pay off.”

Virtualization and Cloud computing
Virtualization is the base enabler of Cloud Computing; as the adoption of Cloud Computing has increased, the concept of Virtualization has also started gaining momentum. Given its potential benefits, organizations are increasingly evaluating Cloud Computing for adoption. However the very premise of the flexible, pay-as-you-go, scalable architecture that Cloud Computing promises to offer, is based on Virtualization.

Large telecom service providers and managed service providers that have the capability and bandwidth to provide remote computing and storage services are now throwing open their huge underutilized capacities for offering cloud-based services especially to the SMB segment.

“With Cloud Computing, organizations do not have to worry about setting up and managing a virtualized infrastructure, since this aspect is taken care of by the cloud service provider,” says Surajit Sen, Director, Channels Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India. Other service providers include Wipro which has launched its w-SaaS Cloud Computing offering.

Another concept that is being pushed forward is the concept of private clouds. The model leverages on Virtualization to provide different computing and application environments within the organization to its various business units on a pay-per-use basis. Vendors such as VMware too have started driving their efforts to tap into the Cloud Computing phenomenon. They are now offering Virtualization products which claim to allow organizations to set up public, private and hybrid clouds.

Looking ahead
While the concept of Virtualization is big in India, its adoption may take some time. Even as Virtualization looks to find larger acceptance in the Indian IT scenario, the arrival of Cloud Computing can change the game for Virtualization in terms of its adoption levels and usage. With Cloud Computing primarily based on Virtualization technologies, growing interest in the former can, in turn, fuel the growth of Virtualization in the country.

While efforts are on at the server and storage side, an avenue that is opening up for this technology in the country is on the desktop side. Vendors are coming forward with offerings that promise to allow customers to take Virtualization beyond their server and storage networks to desktops via virtual desktop applications and thin clients. A few vendors have begun to evaluate what desktop Virtualization has to offer. However, it will
still take time for Virtualization to enjoy mass adoption levels.