Pragmatic path to cloud management: Embotics
Embotics' PR team sent me an interesting white paper a while back. It is called "The Pragmatic Path to Cloud Management." Embotics is putting forward their view of of the following topics.
- Private cloud and the datacenter
- Challenges to adopting virtualization solutions (considering both resources and complexity)
- Laying out the pragmatic path to cloud management
- Embotics' recommendation on the proper path to cloud management
If you're interested in Embotic's view of cloud management, this is worth reading. It is simple, easy to understand and, for the most part, makes a great deal of sense. Organizations would be well served by thinking through the benefits and challenges of a virtualized environment. If they believe that creating an on-premise, in-house cloud environment would be a more effective way for their departments and business units to consume computing resources and for them to deliver those services, this sort of pragmatic approach is the right way to go.
I have a few problems with one portion of the paper. "VM stall" is is a new buzz word that several hypervisor and management software companies have been putting forward. This paper presents this concept as if it is real and not something that has been contrived to shame, cajole or make people think that they simply must put every component of every workload into a virtual machine.
This, of course, is self serving. These suppliers make their money by helping organizations move things into virtualized environments and then to manage those environments. The truth is that virtual machine software is useful for some tasks, but the wrong choice for many others. Putting everything into a virtual machine might create performance, scalability or management problems. (see When is virtual machine technology the wrong choice? for more information.)
I believe that IT decision makers move tasks into virtual servers when there is a business or technical reason for the move. If there is neither a technical nor a business reason, the workloads are staying where they are.