Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Applications you can Virtualize on VMware vSphere Platform



Everytime I jump into any consolidation project, the first question I face is usually about whether the applications which are currently running on a Physical Server can be Virtualized or not. In-fact  their have been situations when I have got a list of 800 applications from one of our Partners to know if they can be virtualized... 

Well I have written about my stand on such questions in one of my post "VMware vCenter Server - Physical vs. Virtual". Here is the extract from that article.....

"People often ask me this question not only for vCenter but for all the other applications which they want to Virtualize. My answer to them is usually this "PLEASE ASK THE APPLICATION VENDOR". The team and the organization who have developed the application know the best about the attributes of the application hence they should be able to tell you whether an application can be virtualized or not."

Well as mentioned, the application vendor is the best person to tell, however here is the link to Major global software vendors broadly support customers running their applications on VMware environments.

"3693 Applications and Countinghttp://vmware-alliances.force.com/supportedapps

Currently there are 3600+ applications certified to run on vSphere and there are more adding this list. The good part is that if you do not find your application here, you can submit the name of the app on this page and VMware along with the ISV community would work on getting the name on the list after conducting the required tests... 

This list is the one which has been created with the help of VMware Alliances and though its comprehensive, it might not be complete. I appreciate this repository from VMware as this speaks about the confidence of VMware customers in Virtualizing the business and infrastructure applications running in their data-centers.

Hope this would help some taking decisions around Virtualizing those applications which you thought were not supported. 


4 comments:

  1. very true, VMware can recommend but not drive the virtualization of applications. Only the App vendor can tell based on the Org requirement and accessibility whether virtualizing the App is good option or not.

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  2. Good Knowledge Sharing Sunny ! Kaustubh

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  3. I run into this so often. Application vendors (especially the small ones) always seem years behind the virtualization side of IT. I have found even though an application vendor says they cannot have their app on a virtualized platform, it still works fine. The app vendor either a) is lazy and sees virtualization as a way out of their support contract. Or b) simply does not understand virtualzation at all and will not or cannot make time to understand it. (Most likely the later).

    Literally out of hundreds of apps I was told "cannot be virtualized" I was able to virtualize. There is only one application I have run into and it was recently where it indeed did not run on virtualization due to some sort of network card dependency. But other than that, with USB passthrough and direct hardware passthrough there is no reason you cannot virtualize an app. The point of the VMware hypervisor is that the OS for the hosted app believes its sandboxed and on its own hardware... it does not understand its virtualized.

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  4. Thanks Ankit for your scoop on this topic & Kaustubh for the kind words..

    @J.D. I completely agree with your thought process around this topic. There is nothing now which cannot be virtualized with the scalability and performance which vSphere 5.1 offers... I also agree that Passthrough was helpful, however SRIOV will take it to the next level... Have a few links to that on this article VMware vSphere 5.1 - What's new with this version? which I wrote a few weeks back - http://goo.gl/TQ2Dz

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