By Jeff Kabachinski
Welcome to TechNation’s newest monthly column – Tech Savvy. The concept behind this column is to provide Healthcare Management professionals with various and current technical details affecting healthcare technology. Most of the time we just need an overview of the technology – not needing the details until a problem arises. The intent here is to provide that overview and serve as a means to find out more when needed.
Virtualization
Virtualization continues to be at the top of the list of things to know about and deal with for healthcare IT professionals. One big driver of virtualization is the savings involved. In the old days (3 years ago – which is 21 IT years) servers typically were dedicated to one app – like a mail server. This led to many servers in a server farm all running at minimal usage – in the order of 15 or 20 percent each. Partially used servers consume just about the same amount of power as a busier server and need the same amount of technical support.
In general, virtualization takes physical hardware and converts it to logical devices. Virtualization employs several methods for managing computer operating systems’ (OS) and applications’ use of the hardware. One method of virtualization provides what is known as a hypervisor between the software and hardware. It captures all OS calls to and from the hardware before passing it on. The hypervisor or extra software layer is called the abstraction layer. This is full virtualization where the OS is not aware that the hypervisor is controlling its access to the hardware. The main point is that the hypervisor allows more than one OS access to the hardware unbeknownst to each OS. Each hosted virtual machine (VM) runs separately and isolated from each other. Each virtual machine works as though it has sole access and control of the shared hardware. In this way one physical computer can host separate and isolated virtual machines. Virtualization also prevents separate applications from interfering with each other.
Increased Efficiency
Microprocessors and applications keep increasing their efficiencies. As applications get more sophisticated they require less computing power to run. CPUs also continue to grow in raw computing power with ever smaller hardware topologies. Packing in over a billion transistors with 22nm lithography with the required 60 miles of copper/gold lines to connect them all! As lithography gets to 12 and 7nm sizes we can expect even more computing power. This is in addition to multi-core processors where each core can handle two programming threads. The ultimate effect is that ever more computing power goes idle – or becomes available for virtual machines.
Paravirtualization
With full virtualization there’s a hypervisor to add capacity and capability however it’s also adding another layer to deal with. With paravirtualization some of the guest OS code is altered to better cooperate with the virtualization processes in the VM. For example, since some of the OS’s protected instruction set must be trapped and handled by the hypervisor – it can be faster and more efficient to modify how the OS operates to bypass the hypervisor and the needed time to trap and respond. Even faster capability can be achieved if the guest OS provided its own imbedded hypervisor or inherently had the ability to operate in a virtualization environment. Operating System level virtualization does just that. It requires many changes to the OS’s kernel but the advantages are speed and efficiency. This is the direction we’re headed. Intel’s latest CPU’s are being built to fully accommodate virtualization with something called Rapid Virtualization Indexing.
Server consolidation is one result by having increased utilization. It reduces server sprawl to lower hardware, support and maintenance costs. Costs are also saved with improved software management and security. In addition, retaining legacy systems gets much easier and more reliable as VMs. However, servers are not the only place where virtualization can occur that is just the most obvious place for savings.
It’s Everywhere
Virtualization can affect many places in IT from the network and operations affecting the bottom line. Virtualization is changing just about every aspect of how systems are managed including storage, networks, security, OS and apps. But, the promises of virtualization are huge, especially with networks – virtualizing network devices such as switches and routers. This is called Software Defined Networking (SDN) and is quickly becoming a part of the IT scenery. Second-level benefits like freeing up IT staff to work on other IT projects pursuing health care business goals should also be considered. Virtualization is a key IT concept to get plugged into. Anyone with interests in a future working with healthcare IT will need to have basic virtualization knowledge and competencies in their skill set.