The joys and worries of data center virtualization

In recent years, we have seen that virtualization has brought us flexibility and high controllability in IT management in many aspects such as workload and dynamic resource allocation. As the demand for data center construction by enterprise users continues to increase, virtualization technology has been brought up by more people. How to apply virtualization technology in data centers? Can virtualization technology bring any "surprises" to data centers?

As we all know, the benefits of virtualization are mainly reflected in improving the utilization of computing resources in data centers. If virtualization is not used, there may be waste. For example, a traditional physical server running a single workload may only use 10%-15% of the server's CPU or memory resources, thus wasting 85%-90%.

However, the main challenge of virtualization is that resource usage is not fixed. Many workloads have varying resource requirements as the number of users changes, or as the type of tasks required at the time change. Considering the critical application in the previous example, it would be possible to allocate as few resources as possible to idle VMs, allocate more resources to VMs that need them, or migrate the deprecated workload to a highly consolidated server, handle lower workloads during off-hours, and then re-migrate and re-adjust for the new day.

This process often requires manual intervention by IT administrators to allocate resources to each virtual machine or consolidate less-used workloads onto secondary servers. It is impractical for administrators or staff to constantly evaluate resource usage and adjust resources or migrate virtual machines in real time, making the application of virtualization technology in the data center particularly difficult.