It is very important to review and analyze the development process of the past to avoid mistakes in the past, and this also applies in the field of technology.

Virtualization technology can reduce the number of physical machines to be managed, but the total number of operating systems does not change. In a virtualized environment, because it is very convenient to create new instances of the system, this may even increase the total number of operating systems. ' Tony Iams, Gartner's managing vice president, wrote on SearchDataCenter more than a decade ago. Toni detailed the difference between server virtualization and server consolidation at the time. Virtualization has dominated the data center for years, but with the advent of virtualized containers, we will see a return to consolidation.

Development of Virtualization Technology

In addition to transforming data centers around the world over the past decade, virtualization technology itself has continued to change. When Toni considered consolidating servers in a virtualized data center in 2005, there were some serious constraints on the amount of resources that a hypervisor could provide to virtual machines, such as CPU, RAM, disk space, and network interfaces. Physical server resources are also much smaller than they are today.

The predictions of Moore's Law are accurate. After more than ten years of hard work by engineers, server hardware and virtual machine management software have been greatly improved. Astronomical amounts of resources become a reality, especially for data center teams that can afford the largest server farms. Hypervisor software is capable of delivering huge virtual machines many times the capacity of the previous generation of physical servers. With a little bit of careful design, almost any workload running on an x86 server can be run on a virtual machine.

Many organizations have adopted virtualization as their x86 platform of choice, realizing immediate investment savings. Many are also seeing huge operational benefits, as well as benefits following the introduction of automation and private cloud. A key feature of virtualization is that applications and operating systems that were used without virtualization can still be used after virtualization. So there is no need to develop a virtualized version of the application, everything that exists will work directly.

Containers reignite the virtualization and consolidation debate

Enterprise adoption of virtualization is as easy as replacing a new server. Nonetheless, virtualization has some challenges. For example, when there is a physical server running 50 Windows virtual machines, a lot of duplicate content and work takes up the server's resources. 50 virtual machines load the same kernel, store the same files on 50 virtual disks, and need to maintain and patch 50 copies of the Windows operating system. This situation is not only for Windows systems, but also for Linux systems: 50 copies of Linux also need to be maintained and use duplicate resources.

Large IT organizations have discovered that virtualization leads to large-scale virtual machine deployments, and automation cannot completely eliminate the cost of virtual machine management. Server consolidation reduces the number of operating systems that need to be maintained. It also reduces the cost of running applications, allowing more applications to run simultaneously at the same cost.

Consolidation without virtualization is very difficult, but may be more effective. This is also the case with container-based server consolidation. Consolidation enables multiple applications to run on the same operating system, or multiple instances of an application to run on a single operating system. The key point is how to isolate these applications and application instances from each other and this is the problem that container technology solves. Virtualized containers isolate container instances from each other without requiring each instance to be isolated with a separate operating system. A single service server can run hundreds of container instances, all of which share a single operating system.

Virtualized containers provide an efficient way to consolidate applications on a single server. Automation tools allow IT teams to create, manage and destroy thousands of instances of the same container. For many applications, this type of orchestration makes containers a better alternative to virtual machines because it is easier to deploy containers today than it was a decade ago.

The challenge with containerization is that it requires developers to rebuild or rewrite the application. We don't deploy Oracle or SQL databases into containers. At least, this approach is very unsuitable for production environments. These applications will continue to run on virtual machines or physical servers. We will see the rise of applications designed to run in containers from the start. These applications will follow the pattern of web applications, where the use of containers is now commonplace.

Over time, containerization tools and good container DevOps practices have grown in popularity in enterprise environments. Application development takes time. It may take 10 years for this revolution to bring containers to the level of popularity that enterprises use today with server virtualization.

Virtualization has become the standard for deploying x86-based work platforms. The agility and flexibility of virtualized containers is the dominant force in this IT revolution. At present, the development of container technology is still a relatively edge data center innovation.

Consolidating technologies may once again be the main driver of IT infrastructure. But after this wave passes, there will always be a new wave.