Section 14.6. The Rise of Utility Computing

14.6. The Rise of Utility Computing

Imagine if you will, the following: From a Web site, an application owner selects from a menu of options the specification for a server that she needs for a new application. She selects a hard-drive size, the amount of memory, the number of processors, and the operating system. She clicks the Submit button. From a small workflow process, approvals are gathered, licensing is paid for, additional questions are asked and answered and in a very short time a new server is provisioned. The application owner is sent an e-mail with a link that when she clicks it opens her new virtual machine. Instead of days, weeks, or months, you've cut server provisioning down to minutes or hours. When the application owner is done with her virtual machine, the resources are reabsorbed for future demand using a de-provisioning process.

With VirtualCenter, all of your ESX Servers are basically one pool of resources, CPUs, disks, memory, and so on. Utilization of each of theses resources is easily monitored and availability is obtained. It's a small step to provisioning.

With the use of VMware's SDK, the possibilities of utility computing become closer and closer. Some time in the not-too-distant future, the ease of virtual machine provisioning will exist ubiquitously throughout IT departments.

Virtualization allows for the natural extension or evolution of this process. Some interesting technologies exist in VMware's ACE product, such as expirations and policy-based virtual machines that if applied to some future version of ESX Server would allow for tremendous utility computing and server provisioning capabilities.