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How do you best manage business-critical applications on a virtualized infrastructure?

That's the question this month for our MacBook Air contest. Best comment on this post wins. You'll need a Disqus account to participate. This is the kind of question that I look forward to hearing about. So, let's hear it, all you DevOps folks and cloud management gurus!

We cover virtualization often, including many case studies on how various organizations are using it. But new data from SpiceWorks gives a higher-level view of who is using virtualization by breaking it down by verticals. SpiceWorks examined data from "100,000 companies in Spiceworks of comparable size in over 100 countries" to produce some interesting insights.

Unsurprisingly, the software industry uses virtualization the most, and by a wide margin. Energy, aerospace and engineering follow. The least virtualized verticals are education, construction and legal.

Developers provide an insightful window into the challenges that come with virtualization. They're not the same as IT, and those differences highlight some important issues to consider when figuring out how business critical applications are deployed in a virtualized environment. Why? Aligning developers and IT is critical to the success of any application that is moving into a virtualized world.

Developers arguably are the most dynamic users of virtualization technology. In part this is due to the advent of Agile development processes. Satisfying the customer is at the heart of the Agile methodology. That means a few things:

You've prepared your critical applications for virtualization. You've tested and selected a virtualization platform. You've built out a fleet of virtual servers and migrated your applications to them. Your hypervisor is configured and you're ready to start sending your uses to your spiffy new virtual environment. Wait. There's one more step you may want to take.

Just because your servers are virtual doesn't mean they don't need network infrastructure. Running multiple virtual servers on the same machine can create I/O bottlenecks and reduce the efficiency of your applications. Fortunately, you can use virtual I/O technology to make sure you're getting the most out of your network infrastructure and eliminate bottlenecks.

Virtualization is so common now that it is rare to find an enterprise that is untouched by the technology.

It is starting to appear as organically as any technology does when people need it to get the work done. There may be any variety of virtualization technologies on the desktop, the server and even mobile devices.

Our series will explore how virtualization is being used across the IT landscape, in big companies and small. We could list any industry and you'd find any number of examples for how it's being adopted. What we will do is illustrate how virtualization is being applied and how you can find new ways to use the technology within your organization.

One of the fun things about being a leader in IT is the opportunity to see new technology and explain it to others for the first time. We love to see people's eyes get big and excited when some new wizardry is introduced and we're the first one to explain it.

In the simplest terms, a key outcome of virtualization that the virtual engine software layer divides either hardware or software into more pieces than originally existed. Instead of one operating system running, the same hardware can run several concurrently. For example, these can even be of different flavors such as Linux and Windows running on the same Intel hardware. Where it gets interesting is that each additional system running doesn't divide computing power in half, like you might expect. Instead, an overall gain in system utilization is found in this approach. This "unused" power frees computing resources without the need to procure new hardware.

Update: Tom Hughes-Croucher of Joyent had this translated last week. The translation is here.

Toshio Mori published a presentation on SlideShare on installing Node.js on a rooted Android phone. Although the slides are in Japanese, enough of the commands are in English that you can make out the steps.

The presentation walks you through rooting your phone, installing QEMU (a virtualizer), running Debian Linux on QEMU and, finally, running Node.js. The actual steps are as follows:

For a long time the IT worker visited a customer to fix a stricken desktop. Often it did not take super human steps to fix the problem. More often than not, it went something like this:

"Chet, I have discovered the problem. Your computer is unplugged. I am now plugging it back in."

ScaleMP, a Cupertino, CA based company, takes multiple physical machines and turns them into a single virtual image for high performance computing. Unlike Beowulf, which runs a single application across multiple machines, ScaleMP creates a single image with one operating system and the combines resources of all the servers.

Why would you want to use ScaleMP instead of buying a single supercomputer?

We regularly feature case studies that look at how organizations are using virtualization to overcome problems that relate to poor application performance.

We thought it would be helpful over the next few weeks to highlight the case studies we've been posting for the past several months.

Each of these case studies focus on the use of VMware virtualization technology on Intel chip architectures.