December, 2008

VMware: We are not an island

This week, when VMware announced its partnership with Hewlett-Packard to integrate its Lab Manager with HP’s Business Technology Optimization software, more specifically, HP Operations Orchestration, it showed that the company realizes that it’s not an all-virtual world — yet — and that there are large pockets of physical systems not under its direct control.

“Lab Manager is a great tool from the point that you already have a physical box with ESX, storage and networking installed,” said Bogomil Balkansky, the senior director of product marketing at VMware. “From there, developers can self-deploy all these virtual configurations. But without that, Lab Manager can do nothing for you.”

To that end, the integration between VMware Lab Manager and HP’s orchestration software aims to offer “one seamless process to do all this [provisioning] from the same place,” he said, enabling the provisioning of bare metal, in addition to virtual, resources.

The target market for the Lab Manager/HP Orchestration suite, to be delivered sometime in 2009, will be the same as the target market for Lab Manager today, namely large independent software vendors (ISVs) and “nonsoftware companies that nevertheless develop a lot of software in-house, for example, telcos and banks,” Balkansky said.

VMware also plans to OEM HP’s Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) Inventory software for use in a new VMware product to be announced in 2009.

The HP deal marks the third time in four months that VMware has partnered with one of the big four systems management companies (HP, BMC, CA and IBM). In September, BMC and VMware said they would collaborate on integrating VMware’s Lifecycle Manager with BMC’s Atrium Orchestrator (formerly Run Book Automation) and Remedy IT Service Management, such that joint customers could make change requests or initiate automation processes from either Lifecycle Manager or BMC products. Then, just last month, CA announced that it would OEM and resell VMware’s Stage Manager as part of its Data Center Automation suite.

“A core tenet of our virtualization management strategy is to integrate our products with the larger systems management offerings,” Balkansky said. That approach should appeal to “larger companies that aspire to a single pane of glass” while at the same time giving them the benefit of “the feature-rich products our tools provide,” he said.

This all seems logical enough, but one question I have is whether there is customer demand for these integrations. Frequently, these sorts of product integrations are a result of customer clamoring for them, but at least in the case of the HP/VMware partnership, a request for a customer reference came up short. “The idea of a single pane of glass resonates very well,” Balkansky said, “but honestly we haven’t solicited quotes and validation given that the integration hasn’t happened yet.”

Virtual appliances: What goes up can also come down

Let’s face it: Spam filters are usually asked to do more, not less. But when McColo’s ISPs shut off its Internet service last month, sending global spam volumes plummeting, a lot of spam filtering applications found themselves, well, twiddling their proverbial thumbs.

That’s just one more reason that spam filtering company SpamTitan can breathe a sigh of relief because it packages its app as a virtual appliance. As volumes of spam go up or down, “you simply add or remove processing power or memory resources, effectively getting a bigger or smaller appliance without having to go back to the vendor,” said Ronan Kavanagh, SpamTitan’s CEO. The process is largely manual, but it’s still more efficient than the alternative.

As an independent software vendor, SpamTitan sees enormous benefits to packaging its software as a virtual appliance rather than as a hardware appliance or as a standalone application, Kavanagh said. “We don’t have to support any hardware. The entire sales cycle can happen online. We can send out evaluation units at no cost to us. The customer can take charge of their evaluation on their own time.” This list goes on.

But Kavanagh said that SpamTitan hasn’t experienced as much adoption of the virtual appliance version of its software as it might have liked. In 2006, it launched its first virtual appliance package on VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and today about 50% of the units it sells ship as virtual appliances. The remainder ship as full ISO images, or bootable CDs.

Part of that may have to do with customer size, Kavanagh said. “Some people don’t use VMware, particularly in [small and medium-sized enterprises]. If they have less than 100 users, they tend to have very limited VMware deployments and are just as happy to use the ISO.”

Spam volumes, on the other hand, are very much on the upswing. “Yeah, they’re on their way up again,” Kavanagh said. Oh, well. It was a nice while it lasted.

Virtual desktops: Do your own math

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about universal clients, ubiquitous data access and streamlined image management, but ultimately the question of whether virtual desktops make sense comes down to what IT decisions always come down to: money.

Johnathan,  a Server Virtualization blog reader, recently posted a comment on one of my posts detailing the math for a 250-seat virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)/thin-client implementation, which amounted to a $350 per-desktop-capex advantage for VDI; a three-times faster deployment schedule and troubleshooting times that were orders of magnitude faster (albeit harder to quantify). Not too shabby.

Of course, that was before VMware announced new pricing for its re-branded VDI suite, View 3. At $150 per seat for View Enterprise or $250 for View Premier, capex savings would decrease to $300 or $200 per desktop. That’s assuming you pay list price, which is highly doubtful. But it also doesn’t account for the storage capacity savings you might  realize by using View Composer to share desktop images: an average of 70%, according to VMware.

Suffice it to say that assigning ROI dollars to an IT project is a highly personal, subjective affair. And that the numbers posted by others are often suspect, as Bernard Golden points out in his article “Virtualization Projections Deserve Scrutiny.” Here, Golden looks into a Butler Group report that reports client virtualization savings of $159,000 for 1,000 desktops, or $159 per desktop, per year. Come to find out, the $159 savings was in energy costs alone. Who knows what the overall cost of the deployment really was?

At any rate, if you’ve done the math on a VDI implementation, and believe that your numbers bear scrutiny, go ahead and post the numbers in the comments section of our blog.