Analogy & Perspective

by Jason Yeo

"Managing servers in god mode" is one of my favorite ways to describe the fundental benefits of virtualization.

To illustrate this, I will use the movie Avatar as an analogy.

The movie starts with the lead character Jake Sully. He's like our typical server workload. When he was recruited into the program, its like taking a physical server and virtualizing it. Nothing has changed to the workload, the original characteristics stay the same. The workload is just as smart, and still as handicapped. Here, just by virtualizing didn't create any miracles (yet) and existing issues remains.

Then the first cool scene arrived, Jake logged on and connected to his Avatar.  The process was fast and he got "transported" to a new body. A new body that's bigger, taller, stronger and has full capabilities. In the VMware world, it's like taking a workload from your private cloud that's resource constraint and doing a vMotion to the public cloud. This is typical of a situation where an expected spike of activity is approaching and IT decides to leverage the massive resources on public cloud to help cope with the incoming burst.

Most other times demand is lower and the workload is capable to run just fine in it's own private cloud. This freedom to move workloads from private to public cloud can save IT shops from having to invest in large capacity farms which may only be required a few times a year.

After several rounds of migrating between private and public cloud, everyone in IT becomes comfortable with the idea of having workloads outside the "body". The alien body works faster, better and when built right, just as secure.

Eventually the private cloud infrastructure has suffered enough battle wounds and it's time to refresh. Instead of taking the conventional approach of buying new hardware. Migrating permanently to the public cloud is a real viable option. The new "alien body" is readily available, it's bigger, better, faster and the workload is just as happy in the new body.

The ritual begins to move Jake's consciousness from his battered human body to the blue alien body. The "god" empowered administrator initiates the migration process to execute vMotion with Storage vMotion. Minutes later, Jake awakens in his Avatar, fully detached from his human body.

In the movie, it took a real alien god to perform the miracle of life. For us, the  convenience of such maneuvers are everyday miracles. Virtualization has granted IT shops the power of the gods to better manage workloads and thus gain great agility to quickly cope with the demands of the businesses.

Jason Yeo

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