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Frank Hill is the director of manufacturing business development for Stratus Technologies. |
Virtualization
The benefits of virtualization are indisputable. More and more manufacturers are using virtualization software on the plant floor to consolidate servers and applications, and to reduce operating and maintenance costs. Some rely on its availability attributes to guard against downtime, as well.
By its nature, virtualization creates critical computing environments. Consolidating many applications onto fewer servers means that the impact of a server outage will affect many more workloads than the one server/one application model typically used without virtualization. The software itself does nothing to prevent server outages, and you can’t migrate applications off a dead server.
Restarting the applications on another server takes time, depending on the number and size of applications to be restarted. Data that was not written to disk will be lost. The root cause of the outage will remain a mystery. If data was corrupted, then corrupted data may be introduced to the failover server.
This may not pose a problem, depending on your tolerance for certain applications being offline for a few minutes to an hour, perhaps more. However, many companies are reluctant to virtualize truly critical applications for this reason. High availability software and fault tolerant servers are viable options to standalone servers, hot back-up or server clusters as a virtualization platform, and worth evaluating. These technologies are sometimes overlooked because of a lack of familiarity, or outdated notions that they are complex or budget-busters.
