By AB Periasamy
Now that hypervisors are mature management tools, monitoring capabilities and standards are evolving. Resources in the cloud are more dynamic, multi-tenant and large-scale. However, full data center virtualization and the cloud cannot be complete without virtualizing the storage layer. Storage virtualization demands an entirely new software-based approach.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix (Xen) initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat.

Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center. Linux is proving to be a superior hypervisor than even a microkernel-based VMware implementation, while having borrowed powerful ideas from microkernel design from early development.

This article will discuss the current state of Linux virtualization and provide best practices, focused on storage, aimed at closing the server-storage virtualization gap.

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