Joseph Foran

Still mulling over a Greene-less VMware

It’s been covered to death, but something about Diane Greene’s ousting from VMware’s top spot still doesn’t sit right with me. Not the ousting itself but the chatter about why. There have been conversations about why she was let go, ranging from EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci wanting greater control of VMware to questions about whether she was more of a technology person and less of a business person. In the end, the appointment of Paul Maritz is the really big news, at least in my not-so-humble opinion.

It goes back to “it’s not what but who you know,” and Maritz knows Microsoft. He knows Ballmer, Gates and every other player there. He was one of the most influential and instrumental executives in Microsoft’s history. His reach is wide when it comes to pulling people into the fold — not necessarily by bringing ex-Microsoft folks in as employees, but rather by having high-level working relationships with all the partners that Microsoft has worked with and that EMC and VMware have worked with or would love to work with. He also knows the PC Revolution firsthand, having seen the rise and fall of Novell’s NetWare, Banyan’s VINES and the host of minis and mains that these replaced, only to be replaced by Windows a few years later.

Tucci also knows Microsoft — EMC’s storage products center around the Microsoft world as much as any other operating system. Exchange data stores, SQL databases, file shares — all of these are EMC’s bread and butter in selling storage to the modern data center. Its software, even though some products compete (like Documentum versus Sharepoint PS), is built around a Windows-centric world.

Then there’s the history — Microsoft knows how to win. It buys what it can’t make on its own, then drowns the competition in price wars and advertising battles. Novell, once Microsoft’s bitter rival for network OS sales, now sells Linux licenses to Microsoft. Netscape is gone and the ghost of its second cousin twice removed, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, lives on to take what is really an insignificant chunk of Internet Explorer’s market share. Corel/Novell WordPerfect? Only if you’re working in a huge law firm will you see WP on an enterprise level.

Put these together and the fabled VMware versus Microsoft Hypervisor war starts to look less like an armed conflict between bitter rivals and more like a strategic partnership built through a demonstration of independence. Tucci’s no fool — Maritz is there for the day that the Redmond giant comes knocking. He’s there to build thin but sturdy roads between the two companies. He’s there to forge something like the Citrix/Microsoft alliance, where Citrix is an independent company but still acts in many ways like a subsidiary of Microsoft (or at least an extension). In Martiz’s VMworld keynote speech (not the parts about having “sins to atone for” in his early days of programming for the PC Revolution), he barely mentioned Greene and hardly touched on competition with Microsoft. He’s looking forward to the day when he can do what only Citrix has managed to do so far — preserve independence while under Redmond’s all-seeing eye.

In the end, we’ll see VMware’s VDC-OS as the dominant force in the virtualization space with Hyper-V as an acceptable but lesser alternative, much like Citrix’s MetaFrame/XenApp and Microsoft’s Terminal Services. I think this leaves one question: In the long run, what happens to Citrix now that it’s betting so heavily on Xen and taking on Microsoft and VMware directly in the systems virtualization market?

My favorite schwag item from VMworld 2008

As I sat in my cozy office, drinking from a VMware mug, wearing a SearchVMware.com t-shirt under my dress shirt, saving drafts of a SharePoint training presentation to a 1GB USB stick emblazoned with eG’s logo and watching Jan and Hannah go through their big bag-o-stuff from the conference, I mulled over something … what was the one thing, above all of the other schwag, that I wound up using most? The answer was the lowest-tech item there: Sun’s little black book.

Yup, just a small black notepad. I’ve already filled up ten pages of notes in just around two weeks, and I now carry it with me to all my meetings. I look less rude taking notes on paper than entering them into my Blackberry (the message most people get when they see that: “Is this person note-taking or is he texting?” You tell me!). It fits in whatever bag I carry, whether it’s a notebook case, organizer or nothing at all. It’s better than a USB drive due to the simplicity of “open and write” versus “boot and type.”

So, the Completely Unofficial Best of VMworld Schwag Award (TM, patent-pending, Copyright 2008, all rights reserved) goes to Sun Microsystems for providing such an elegant and simple tool.

EG’s software a hit

EG Innovations took a Best of VMworld award for the application and infrastructure management category, and as one of the judges, it’s my pleasure to tell you why … eG gets it, and it gets IT. The “it” the company gets is business. There were a lot of entries in the category, ranging from desktop virtualization management, cloud computing management and traditional system/network management. EG stood out because its product took a real user problem (in the demo, customers who had problems depositing money via a bank website) all the way through the final root cause analysis, and did so in a clear, consistent fashion that was very easy to trace back to the relative obscurity of a Samba process gone haywire on a file server. The company’s service-level agreement (SLA) awareness was elegant, particularly in that a failure to meet an SLA was a source of system alerts. Its mix of agentless and lightweight agents and its ability to manage system alerts in real time was great, akin to many of the others in the category. In the end, the business awareness put eG over the top.

It was deep level, allowing IT staff to react quickly with appropriate (and relevant) technical information at their disposal to solve problems or initiate handoffs between departments if needed. The business view allows IT to conceptualize the impact of a problem or SLA failure, and thus better align itself with the business. The wide array of hosts, services and vendors supported by the product grants a big boon — having one tool to rule them all (LotR jokes are prohibited, thank you). It’s a tool that a seasoned sysadmin and an entrenched CIO can both love, and better yet, both use.

So … on my trademarked poker scale: EG gets a solid nine pokers. It’s hot, like a fireplace poker, and if you get jabbed by it, you will certainly know it!

On the other side of VMworld ‘08

I’ll keep it short: It was a great conference, but mostly for the networking and meetings. I’ll take the negative nelly role here and say outright that when it came to the products, I wasn’t too impressed, wasn’t too wowed and wasn’t too giddy. I’ve seen a lot of great announcements, heard a lot of great talk and definitely met a lot of great people, but I haven’t seen much else that I’m really going “Wow!” over. The Cisco announcement has been a year in the coming. We heard about it at last year’s conference, and it’s still not fully released. ESX 4 … wasn’t that demo-ed last year? VDC-OS? Show me a product. I’ve sat through press briefings, product announcement, labs and seminar after seminar, and I keep coming back to those Wendy’s commercials from the ’80s … Where’s the Beef?

NEC’s got me piqued. It seems ready to re-enter the American market in a big way, reversing its trend of avoiding the U.S. as a full-systems seller like we all had monkey pox. The company also seems to have the best end-to-end VDI solution out there, extending VMware’s product on its own hardware, with multimedia and USB capabilities.

Cisco’s got me curious. I’m hoping for a product launch soon so I can see the inside of this new plug-in networking module architecture. I’m not holding my breath, however, because this has been in the pipe for a long time without much substance. True, the VMware virtual switches we all know and love today were originally co-designed with Cisco, but that just makes me wonder why there hasn’t been a formal product on the market before now.

On to the cloud. As I told the incomparable John Troyer in the podcast Andrew Kutz and I did … if your product is vapor, don’t call it cloud. Show me a Web OS client that can run virtualized apps. Show me federation over the Web with cloud services that integrate with internal services. Show me something!

The glitz was top notch. The glam was top notch. The parties — I think you see where this is going. Long story short, this conference was one about maintenance mode rather than being unveiling anything major, but it sure was fun.

ThinLaunch not all that impressive

At the New Innovators both at VMworld 2008 was an interesting small booth from ThinLaunch, which was manned by three of the four people in the company. I had a short pow-wow with two of the folks there and came away with mixed feelings. The product, for which the company is named, appears to fulfill a couple of interesting needs, the first being IT shops that want to pilot virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but don’t want to invest beyond the server room, and the second being smaller businesses that have server virtualization capacity to devote to hosting clients but have been loathe to rip and replace their thick clients with new thin hardware. I’m not too wowed by the product but I can see where it may be useful. That said, I was royally unimpressed with the technology.

ThinLaunch can be cobbled together with a few Group Policy object edits in Active Directory without buying the product. Simply replace the shell with whatever VDI launcher (or other application) you want. Microsoft tells you how to do it here. True, ThinLaunch then monitors this process if it crashes and can automatically restart it, but this is also something that can be managed with an application or by copying the code from this site.

ThinLaunch is available as an MSI package, meaning it’s very easy to deploy via Group Policy. Then again, Group Policies are even easier to deploy via group policy. Duh. ThinLaunch requires .NET 2.0. and GPOs don’t. ThinLaunch supports Windows 2000 through Vista and 2K8. GPOs do too.

I can see the need for this package and I can even see some large enterprise customers who’d want a packaged application to handle the conversion of legacy desktops. I can even see using the product in small businesses with virtualization already in place but a lot of legacy desktops and a lack of cash. What I can’t see is how it’s innovative in its approach.

Sorry, ThinLaunch, but you get three out of ten pokers — there’s just nothing hot there.

EsXpress: A good idea come ’round again

I had the opportunity to spend a little time at the esXPress booth at VMworld 2008 this year, and I could kick myself. Hard.

To go to the start of why … a long time ago, back when my office primarily used VMware GSX3 for virtulization at the server level, I had a real need to do backups of the virtual machine disk files (VMDK). My GSX hosts were Linux servers and I used a simple cron job to launch scripts on a schedule, which triggered a suspension, tarring of the VMs and scp-ing of the tarballs to a network-attached storage (NAS) box before re-starting the guests. It let me avoid buying backup licenses for my guests (which were mostly pre-production units, image builds, etc.) and gave me a complete point-in-time recovery solution better than anything I could buy off the shelf (at the time). It ws so efficient that when my company joined the Core Customer Program, I was asked to give a webinar on the topic. Sadly, that webinar is now so out-of-date that it’s been pulled from VMware’s site and I can’t find it on archive.org.

Now why would I kick myself? Because that simple idea is at the root of esXpress. It does it a lot better than I did and focuses on ESX rather than GSX/Server, but at the core it’s very similar. It gets around the need for downtime and uses gzip under the hood rather than tar, but it has a Linux OS guest that essentially copies, compresses and offloads other guests. I was pretty impressed by how simply and efficiently the product works, though I must admit to being bit jealous — if only I had realized there was a <i>product</i> there in that idea.

So kudos to esXpress for taking a good idea and making a good product out of it!

Server virtualization in the age of mergers and acquisitions

Last week at VMworld ’08, while living in the glitz of Vegas for a week of product news, press releases, interviews and judging the Best of VMworld entires with my TechTarget colleagues, my constantly buzzing BlackBerry delivered the latest financial news — the collapse of Lehman, the fall of Morgan, the implosion of AIG — all saying the doom of the market is upon thee.

As an investor, this wasn’t my happiest week (I always felt it was odd to invest money in people who invest money), but for a lot of others, last week must have been miserable indeed. Among those who are feeling miserable right now are IT staffers at Bank of America, who must now acquire a global IT infrastructure as their company acquires Morgan Stanley. And of course, federal IT staff are now worrying about how to oversee the essentially nationalized AIG. That’s not to mention the IT teams at numerous other companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions.

This is the time for server virtualization to shine. Bank of America should lead the charge in making efficient use of virtualization in their acquisition of Morgan Stanley. BofA is going to inherit an immense quantity of hardware, not to mention enormous heating/cooling/electric bills, colossal real estate costs and a titanic regulatory compliance project as it tries to integrate its own IT infrastructure with Morgan’s. If BofA (or any acquiring company for that matter) is smart, it will use virtualization to physical-to-virtual (P2V) every possible asset, transport to its own data center and import those virtual systems.

Bank of America shouldn’t just P2V low-hanging fruit, either — it should reach for the stars. Then it should shut down that physical hardware, wipe it and sell it to help offset the project costs. There are obviously a lot of nuanced steps involved in making this happen, but all the major pain points to which virtualization presents solutions are all the major pain points in integrating a new IT infrastructure:

1) Server move/change/add/remove
2) Power costs
3) Real estate costs
4) Heating and cooling
5) Configuration management
6) Asset management

The difference between the slow-rolling projects in most companies and the aggressive plan I recommend is night and day. The ROI in a progressive rollout can be achieved over time, integrated into the budget and then applied over that time. The costs of an acquisition and the integration of that acquisition’s IT assets are immediate and immense.

Virtualization can provide those long-term benefits in the short term — the elimination of real estate, cooling and power costs alone will offset the cost of licensing and storage. The enhanced backup and retention possible with virtualized systems will go a long way towards easing regulatory concerns of data retention.

VCP certification proves highly valuable

The VCP (VMware Certified Professional) certification I have blogged about twice before has gone through the roof. I have never seen a jump like this in all my years in IT. See for yourself.

View Larger Salary Graph

On an interesting note, the graph is from a new feature on their site for bloggers, although Wordpress doesn’t like the display, so I still did my usual upload-a-screencap-to-photobucket, but tried to respect Indeed.com’s format.

What do I think about this data? I’m betting on lots of people with advanced degrees, lots of experience, and/or other high-end certs having added the VCP to their career-building portfolio, as well as more top-level management and executives. Also of note is the missing Red Hat Certified Architect numbers. The VCP trend does not seem to have continued across the pond, where the prevailing charts seem to show a continuous value for the VCP.

The lesson here is watch the figures, but don’t be surprised when wild, near-impossible salaries turn out to be a case of too-good-to-be-true.

Proxmox PVE offers VM mash-up for the virtualization market

The mashup market is for more than just those out there making rich-media web apps. They’ve taken the concept of the mashup to the virtualization market. The resulting product is a mash-up of two virtualization platforms, OpenVZ and KVM, which Proxmox has combined into a delightful new offering that will run just about any operating system as a virtual machine. Virtual appliances are also included in the mashup.

Like VMware VI, VirtualIron and XenServer, Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) is a bare-metal, type-1 hypervisor that installs onto a fresh server and turns the machine into a dedicated virtualization host. It is an open source product based on open source products, making it transparent to developers, and thereby it has all the advantages and disadvantages associated with OSS deleopment projects (I find few disdadvantages myself, but I’m admittedly biased because I think that the transparency of OSS is highly valuable.) The goal, outlined in their vision page, is to create an enterprise-class virtualization platform that affords unparalleled flexibility (my words, not theirs.)

The short-list of what PVE supports:

• Web-based Administration via SSL
• Bare-metal installation based on Debian Etch (64-bit)
• Your choice of Container-based (OpenVZ) or Fully-Virtualized (KVM) virtual machines, both on the same server, as well as Paravirtualization for Windows via AMD/Intel CPU extensions and KVM’s built-in ability to handle them.
• Built-in backup and restore
• Live and offline migration

This is one of those will-be-great-if-it-lives products. It has a lot going for it, particularly in the ability to manage multiple types of virtualization platform strategies. That said, there are still many drawbacks, as expected of a pre-1.0 release (currently at 0.9). As such, it’s got it’s share of issues to get through before it’s really ready.

PVE currently doesn’t seem to have much in the way of granular user management for the web interface (though the forums do state that it is on the roadmap). Physical-to-virtual (P2V) capabilities are still a little raw, without any in-house tools to handle migrations. The Wiki site for PVE does explain how to use existing tools such as vmzdump, VMware Converter, etc. to migrate servers into formats that PVE can handle. There’s nothing in the way of DRS/HA equivalents, and while PVE does have tools for Live Migration, they don’t work due to a”kernel error”, according to the Wiki.  KVM backup is limited to using LVM2, whereas OpenVZ has that option as well as vzdump, though a tool for KVM  on the roadmap for 1.0. Guest SMP is described as unstable, as well.

The cluster management feature looks a little like this image, from their website:

The more day-to-day function of creating a new virtual machine looks like this:

Because it’s a Debian operating system, storage choices are limited only by the availability of drivers for the hardware platform.  iSCSI, NFS, and other remote storage file systems can be mounted and used to store virtual machines.

The product looks like it will shake up some thinking in the virtualization platform market and may get people thinking more about what it means to be limited to only one type of virtualization option. When it hits that magic 1.0 mark, and most of the major flaws above are fixed for the majority of users, this product could really shine. Overall, I rate this product a seven poker for stirring things up, down from nine because it’s still cooking.

VMware Certified Professionals command higher salaries, report shows

It’s been six months since I posted about the value of the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certificate, and I thought I’d provide an update.

As the image shows, courtesy of indeed.com, the VCP is as hot as ever.

Since I last covered this topic, the following shifts occured:

• The VCP gained $3,000
• The A+ climbed $6,000
• Network+ declined $1,000
• MCP gained $1,000
• MCSE gained $2,000
• CCA lost $2,000
• CCEA picked up $2,000
• RHCT picked up $3,000
• RHCE picked up$2,000
• RHCA lost $1,000

The big gain in VCP salaries over a period of less than six months shows that this technology is still very much an in-demand skill set and a hot certification to show off. It’s a new year and salaries did jump overall, so this is reflected in the data. As before, the international trend is also continuing, as the next two images (from itjobswatch.co.uk) show, in terms of salary and demand.

I intend to keep tracking these statistics every few quarters, so stay tuned. I’m also keeping my eye out for Citrix-sponsored Xen certifications and will be bringing an analysis of those to the blogosphere as soon as there’s some quantifiable information available.  And with VMware ramping up its certification programs, I expect to be adding second and third-tier VMware certifications.

What other certifications do you think should be compared? I’ve included a broad list of non-developer certs to show the variety and range in entry-level (MCP, A+) system admin certs through top-tier (CCEA, RHCA) certs to compare the VCP’s placement as a hot-technology. I’ve left off network, storage and many specialty certs because they may not be pervasive enough in the enterprise or may not be relevent topically. Since I’m one person with one view, I hope our readers will comment below and dictate to me what should be compared. So please fire away.