Concurrent Heavy Workloads

Even with our fantastic engineering team at Varrow, our presales organization sometimes struggles with this common customer question... "Is there a good way to go from a virtual guest to a physical server?"

At Citrix Summit this week though, I had one of those "ah hah" moments that simple elegant solutions can cause. During one of the presales architectural sessions, an emerging Citrix product called Provisioning Server (PVS) was included in a diagram as a way to stream guest images to either physical or virtual environments. The "ah hah" that I experienced was caused by the realization that if you can choose which environment you are streaming to, then you can use the management capabilities of PVS to migrate images from virtual to physical environments and back again.

Sounds like I got caught up in a "geek out" moment right? What's the business implication here? Well, all of those trouble workloads in your datacenter that are only virtualization candidates some of the time can now be migrated back and forth from bare metal hardware depending on the business demands of your users. A database server that gets pounded during the financial close of each period can be moved to a physical server during that high use time and moved back into your virtual environment during the rest of the year. Just like some software companies have a concurrent user licensing model, you can use PVS to scale your physical server environment according to the number of "concurrent heavy workloads" that you have at any given time. Maybe, you could even engineer flexible leasing terms that let you increase and decrease your physical server count according to your seasonal business needs.