Scott Jones

Before I continue with the SVS discussion, let’s pause and define “virtualization”.

The word “virtual” has been used extensively in the IT industry for many years. There’s been the concept of “Virtual Private Network” (VPN), for example, since at least 1992 (the year of the first production IPsec VPN implementation — the concept existed for a few years prior to that). And mainframes have been regrouping physical machines into logical (or “virtual”) machines since at least the early 60’s, where a computer named Joe, for example, may actually be one of several virtual machines running on the same piece of hardware, or may have pieces of itself spread across multiple pieces of hardware, perhaps even at different locations. But “Joe” is still accessed, used and managed as one computer. That is, your “view” into the system is as one thing.

There’s virtual memory, virtual directories, virtual storage, a few different uses of “virtual server”, virtual machine (with a slightly different meaning in the PC world than on the mainframe), on and on… But regardless of the specific use, the meaning of “virtualization” is captured nicely in this definition from Wikipedia:

“…the process of presenting a logical grouping or subset of computing resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration.”

The goal of virtualization, in the computer world, is to take all of the myriad units that resources are naturally or physically divided into — from metal cabinets down to individual bits and bytes — and regroup them into more useful units. This makes not just access easier, but also use and management. The goal, after regrouping everything, is to end up with a view into your systems that is somehow simpler than what you started with. Simplifying management through virtualization is one of the hottest topics in the IT industry today, and that is the focus for Altiris (tho easier access and use are natural side effects of improved management).

[I'm not going to try to define "management" here -- for the purpose of this discussion, just think of it in the broadest sense you can imagine.]

I’ve been using the following PowerPoint slide to show key vendors who have specific management products based on virtualization technologies.

A. Various forms of virtualization and where Altiris SVS fits in.

Each of these layers in the technology stack compels a completely different technical approach to virtualization. Virtualization occurring at one layer in the stack is completely invisible to virtualization occurring at other layers. So all these different types of virtualization can potentially co-exist. But remember that the goal is to simplify. Combining multiple forms of virtualization could make things worse. You could end up with an exponential increase in the number of views into your IT environment, which would only complicate management.

But virtualization at each level has unique advantages that customers will want to utilize. All of the vendors above, and anyone else entering this space, will need to cooperate to figure out how to make their products work together. Customers should be able to take advantage of both system and software virtualization, for example, and have the resultant view of their resources be something simpler than it would be without the combination. I’m a strong advocate of cross-vendor cooperation (and open source, but that’s another discussion), and Altiris is making an effort to move everyone toward integration and interoperability. The fact that we have existing strategic alliances with most of the companies in the slide above puts us in an interesting position to facilitate that cooperation.

["Managed Virtualization" is the marketing term we are using -- already cooperatively with some of our partners such as VMware and Dell -- since Altiris' raison pour être is management, not virtualization per se -- of all IT resources, whether they be conventional, virtual or mixed.]

There are complications, tho. In some cases, vendors at the same level are fierce competitors and they are reluctant to support open technology that puts their competition on par. But another interesting thing about Altiris is that our virtualization technology stands alone at the file system level in the stack, and all of these guys want the management tools around their stuff that Altiris has in its catalog (inventory, asset control, patch management, provisioning, security audit, etc., etc.). As a result, so far every virtualization vendor we have spoken to sees synergy and wants to work together (the one notable exception being Softricity, which for now has chosen to try taking Altiris on head-to-head).

So that’s “virtualization” in this context. Next I’ll explain what file system redirection is, in particular Fortress, Altiris’ use of file system redirection to acomplish file system-level virtualization.