When my wife refers to her "dad", her siblings know whether she's talking about her biological father or stepfather. Virtualization consultants similarly tend to have little trouble differentiating whether a "server" refers to a virtual machine or to something upon which a virtual machine is residing. But Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), as the first specially built virtual infrastructure hosting platform, is confusing even industry experts.
Just one recent article, (August 1, 2009 Redmond Mag.com) reports that Chris Wolf of Burton Group, "…believes Cisco will fight an uphill battle in the competitive blade server market" while in contrast IDC says that UCS, "offers a clean-sheet approach to solve data center challenges". Greg Schulz of The StorageIO Group, observes that UCS is, "…an integrated platform that offers all data center building blocks in a unified form factor.", yet also remarks that, "…Cisco is new to the server world." Staten and Schreck of Forrester Research state that UCS "…is the next step in blade server technology" but also claim that, "No one is clamoring for another server vendor."
Historically it hasn't mattered if organizations were virtualizing 100 or 1,000 servers; they have only had one choice for hosting those servers – a server. The problem is that servers were designed to run applications, not virtual machines. This has led to myriad challenges ranging from lack of enough memory and network ports to cabling issues to resource provisioning frustrations.
UCS is creating a huge industry buzz because it was developed over a period of three years to incorporate the performance and management requirements necessary to optimize virtual infrastructure – and IT staffs are quickly grasping its game-changing capabilities. The synergies between UCS and VMware vSphere extend well beyond the technical integration. Just as an enterprise vSphere deployment creates a compelling opportunity for UCS, the Cisco platform in turn generates a higher level of comfort for virtualizing 100% of the data center.
Server Semantics
An easy solution to the terminology turmoil is to simply refer to UCS, or to anything hosting VMs as, well, a host. This makes it easy to both categorize and understand UCS. A traditional server can, of course, also be a host – but when it's a host it's no longer a server.
Now that the server semantics are settled, we can turn our attention to other philosophical ruminations such as, what exactly is a desktop?
But if the UCS blade is running Windows or Linux then it IS a server. HP Virtual Connect gives you partial ability to migrate the "state" assuming you're san-booting and nobody calls those hosts unless they're running a hypervisor.
Posted by: Jae Ellers | August 25, 2009 at 01:10 AM
Jae,
You are, of course, absolutely correct. But since the UCS was designed as an optimized hosting platform for VI, I decided not to go there.
Posted by: Steve Kaplan | August 25, 2009 at 06:53 AM