April, 2009

VMware bristles at suggestions of lousy IOPS performance

When it comes to IOPS performance, VMware has its proverbial panties in a bunch. Plagued by the public perception that IO-intensive workloads don’t perform well in a virtual machine, the company is on a mission to prove otherwise, throwing tremendous amounts of engineering resources at the task.

With vSphere 4, VMware is publicly stating that a single virtual machine can drive an outlandish 300,000 IOPS, up from 100,000 IOPS with ESX 3.5. Then, at the vSphere launch last week, VMware CTO Steve Herrod told the audience that his engineers had just broken the 400,000 IOPS mark that very morning.

Clearly, VMware cares about IOPS.

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Open source hypervisors face an uphill battle

VMware vs. Microsoft is the hot debate in virtualization these days, but what about proprietary vs. open source hypervisors?

Forrester Research has an interesting take on that topic. The firm’s new report, “Are Open Source Hypervisors Viable for You?” says the recession will drive more businesses to consider open source virtualization. I’m not sure I agree.

In most other technology markets, the “open source is free/cheap, and more people want free/cheap things when the economy is bad, so more people want open source” argument holds up. But to paraphrase Allen Iverson, we’re talking about virtualization! Not other markets. Not other markets. We’re talking about virtualization!

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Consolidation ratios are yesterday’s news

Ever notice that when you talk to someone about virtualizating, it always seems to come down to, “So, what’s your consolidation ratio?” Everyone seems to care only about the number of virtual machines you can house on a single host system. While consolidation ratios are important, they’re yesterday’s news!

Virtualization is about so much more than just shrinking the footprint (physical and carbon) of your data center. Think about it: What does virtualization really do for you? It encapsulates your workloads (servers) into a collection of files that are consistent, that are portable, that are uncoupled from hardware, and that can be copied from location to location. Let’s look at each of these benefits individually:

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Oracle-Sun: A threat to VMware?

You may have heard this morning that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Like Ron Burgundy, it’s kind of a big deal.

Most of the early reaction to the news has focused on the fallout in the database market. Oracle, the market leader, now owns the biggest thorn in its side, Sun’s open source MySQL.

But the real legacy of the Oracle-Sun acquisition could be its effect on the virtualization market — particularly on VMware.

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Bricks or blades?

Bricks (standard rack-mount servers) are a known entity. You’ve been buying and deploying them forever. You are comfortable with bricks.

Blades (blade servers) are cool. They’re small. They look really neat in your rack. Your vendor really wants you to buy blades.

The question is, which platform is right for your virtual infrastructure? I’m here to say that, for the majority of environments, blades are the right answer. Why’s that, you ask? Well, it’s really pretty simple. Virtualization is all about simplifying your environment. It’s about having consistency in platform and in process/procedure. It’s about rapid provisioning and rapid recovery from failures. It’s all about commoditizing your IT infrastructure to enhance support to your line of business applications.

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Virtualization vendor comparisons

There has been a lot of mud slinging and FUD raising among virtualization vendors lately as the quest to rule the virtualization space continues.

One vendor will release information about its product, comparing performance, pricing or features to another vendor, with the other vendor firing back with its own response shortly thereafter. With all this going on, who are you to believe if you are in the market to adopt a virtualization solution in your own environment?

Comparisons by vendors themselves are always biased; after all, they want you to buy their product and not a competitor’s. Performance comparisons between vendors — even by third parties — don’t always tell the big picture and can be difficult to interpret.

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I just virtualized my data center. Was I successful?

I’ve been involved in many data center virtualization projects and one thing that continues to amaze me is that, far too often, the senior management team has no way of knowing if the project is a success. Oh sure, the manager of the data center is thrilled! He’s got only 10% of the systems he had before the project began — but what does that mean to the CxO? Absolutely nothing!

The CxO doesn’t care how many servers are in the data center. He doesn’t care if those servers are running below 10% utilization. He couldn’t care less that there are now only 500 network cables rather than the original 15,000. He doesn’t even really care that the cost of power and cooling has been slashed by 75%. In the grand scheme of things, all those savings amount to a few decimal points in the overall corporate budget. If you want to get your CxO excited, you need to demonstrate that you’re favorably impacting something that he does care about — his line of business applications.

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VMware fires back against Microsoft’s mythbusters

VMware and its supporters have made like Mr. Burns and released the hounds on Microsoft.

The object of their ire is the “Top 10 VMware Myths” video, which features two Microsoft execs trying (sometimes a little too hard) to show why Hyper-V is better than VMware. Viewers on Microsoft’s own site called the video “embarrassing” and said “we deserve better than this,” but that criticism pales in comparison to reaction on other blogs.

The award for Most Thorough Response goes to VMware’s Mark Chuang, who posted a 2,500-word rebuttal on the VMware Virtual Reality blog. Check out some of these zingers:

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Microsoft’s ‘embarrassing’ Hyper-V vs. VMware video

Microsoft has taken its virtualization marketing push and kicked it up a notch — BAM! — but it may be doing more harm than good.

The company’s new “Microsoft Mythbusters: Top 10 VMware Myths” video aims to dispel VMware’s claims about how good its own products are and how much Hyper-V stinks up the joint. Some viewers see it differently, however. They say Microsoft is in no position to talk and that smugness-tinged videos like this one are “embarrassing.”

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