For some reason, the rest of the software industry has not caught on to this and think that this is not a scalable architecture. I'm amazed. I don't think any of these software firms have ever looked at a manual or talked to the vendors or their customers running virtual data centers.
There's no reason production implementations cannot run on a VM. Modern VMs are just as configurable and scalable as physical servers. Even more so in fact, since the files can be moved from one host server to another where more resources can be allocated.
Wake up, application vendors! VMWare is just as good as an IBM P server in terms of configuring hosted configurations. This is the 21st century, let's start thinking a little more "out of the (server) box"
3 comments:
Matt,
I'm curious as to your example for this. While I'll admit I didn't exactly consult SAP for this, the IdM Architecture I created for my project almost exclusively used virtualization, except for the database and that was in favor of a shared database implementation which has its own advantages.
I agree with the sentiment. Virtualization, for me, is the rule, not the exception. Tell me why I can't do it otherwise its going on an ESX box :)
I've seen a couple of vendors that claim not to support VM in production when there is no reason not to from an architectural point of view. I'm not sure if they don't understand virtualization, or if they have a bias against VMWare (I could see this from SUN, IBM and some Linux flavors)
It just makes me wonder...
I certainly agree with the concept, but I guess I can also understand the vendor's trepidation in adding that layer of abstraction to what is already a diverse marketplace for platform support.
Right now you have Windows, Linux & Unix (in its various flavors) to support. Now you exponentially alter that support matrix by needing to support at least the big 3 in the virtualization space. And we haven't even begun to address application virtualization in this space.
Knowing how some of these products have evolved (IBM, for example), I guess I can understand why they're slow to adopt virtualization for the IdM stack. They've barely gotten traction integrating their own products successfully, much less trying to tackle another layer of abstraction for tuning and support.
In the end I agree with you that virtualization is becoming a norm, and IdM in particular is becoming sufficiently commoditized that production support should be offered for their respective products. Ultimately, it will be the customers that push that agenda, I think.
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