virtualization costs

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.

Market share: So what?

A recent report from IDC claims that Microsoft’s market share in the virtualization arena grew drastically in the second fiscal quarter of 2008 because of the release of Hyper-V. While the accuracy of the report is questionable, as pointed out by one blogger, it does beg the question: Do customers really care about market share?

One common misconception is that market share makes one product better than another. Although typically the product with the greatest market share is the best product, this isn’t always the case. Just because a product is popular doesn’t mean it’s better than its competitors (take Internet Explorer versus Firefox or Opera as an example). In this specific case, however, VMware does have the better and more popular product. The recent market share increase by Microsoft is due in great part to the excitement generated by Hyper-V’s recent release rather than it being better than VMware ESX.

According to a recent Gartner report, VMware has an 89% market share and is the clear leader in the management/automation, maturity/stability, security and ISV support categories. The one area where it gets low marks is price, which in my opinion is not a big deal because if you look at value instead of price VMware would also get high marks.

Purchasing one product over another simply because of market share is not smart shopping. Someone looking to virtualize should carefully consider all of the available products before choosing one. This includes evaluating them, gathering RFPs, reading product reviews and talking to others who are using the product before finally making an informed decision on which product is best.

Would you buy a particular car brand simply because it was the most popular? Probably not. You would look at features, price, reviews, take a test drive and do whatever else you can to find more information before choosing the car that works best for you.

So is market share important to you and would it influence your decision to choose a virtualization product? Let us know in the comments below.

Free virtualization tools for tough economic times

Many IT departments feel the squeeze from the current economic crisis and have seen their budgets slashed. When times are tough you must get creative, and the best way to do that is to utilize products that won’t cost you a dime. Can’t afford new ESX licenses right now? Why not recycle some of that older hardware with one of the free hypervisors? Or better yet, take one of your big servers that only runs one application and install ESXi so you can run other applications concurrently. Let’s go over some free products that you can download and use in your VMware environment.

Free hypervisors:
VMware Server – Version 2.0 has lots of new features and can be installed on several versions of Windows, Linux and almost any hardware.

VMware ESXi – The entry-level edition of VMware’s enterprise-class hypervisor; the installable version installs bare metal on a variety of supported and unsupported hardware.

VMware Player – A great tool for starting up virtual machines without installing a full hypervisor on your system.

Free appliances:
The VMware appliance marketplace has hundreds of free appliances that span a variety of categories. Appliances range from simple firewalls to enterprise monitoring systems to full-blown Web and database packages (LAMP). You can run these appliances with VMware Player or import them into ESX/Server/Workstation and run them there.

Free management and reporting tools:
Embotics v-Scout – A free, agentless tool for tracking and reporting on virtual machines in VMware VirtualCenter-enabled environments.

Hyper-9 – This soon-to-be-released free search-based reporting tool is a great addition to every administrator’s toolbox. Watch for its release around the end of the year. If you are interested in participating in a beta version of this tool, drop me an email. Not all beta requests will be approved and the company is looking for feedback if you do participate.

RVTools – A handy little tool that displays a multitude of information about your virtual machines.

Solarwinds VM Monitor – A free management tool that monitors ESX hosts and virtual machines.

Snaphunter and Snapalert – Utilities that can report all running snapshots on ESX hosts, including name, size and date. They can also automatically email reports and optionally commit snapshots.

Visio Stencils – Some free Visio stencils from Veeam, VMGuru and the Visio Café to help you document your environment.

VMotion Info – A free utility that gathers system and CPU information from your hosts and puts it in a single overview to check for VMotion compatibility.

VM Explorer - A management tool that eases management, backup and disaster recovery tasks in your VMware ESX Server environment.

MCS StorageView - A utility that displays all of the logical partitions, operating systems, capacity, free space and percent free of all virtual machines on ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x .

ESX HealthCheck - A script that collects configuration information and other data for ESX hosts and generates a report in HTML format.

Free administration tools:
Putty – A must-have utility for every administrator to remotely SSH into their ESX hosts.

Veeam FastSCP – A great SSH file transfer utility application.

WinSCP – Another speedy SSH file transfer utility application.

KS QuickConfig - Designed to reduce the time needed to deploy and configure VMware ESX servers as well as eliminate inconsistencies that can arise with manual operations.

VP Snapper – A free utility that lets you revert to multiple VM snapshots at once rather than one-by-one.

VMware Converter – VMware’s free application that lets you perform physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual operations.

vmCDconnected – A handy utility that scans all virtual machines in your infrastructure and shows if they have a CD connected to any of them. After scanning you can disconnect all of the CDs with a click of a button.

CPU Identification Utility – VMware’s free utility that displays CPU features for VMotion compatibility, EVC and 64-bit VMware support.

VMTS Patch Manager – A great ESX host-patching application for those who don’t have Update Manager.

Free backup utilities:
VISBU - A free backup utility that runs from the Service Console and provides VMDK-level backups of any VM in storage that is accessible by the host.

VM Backup Script – A backup script to perform hot backups of your virtual machines.

Free storage utilities:
Openfiler – A free, open source, browser-based storage appliance that supports NFS and iSCSI. It can be downloaded as an ISO file to install on a server or as a VMware appliance to import to an ESX host. A great way to get more shared disk in your environment by turning physical servers into network-attached storage servers or turning the local disk on your ESX hosts into shared disk when using the appliance.

Xtravirt Virtual SAN – A free solution that turns local disk space on your ESX hosts into shared VMFS volumes to avoid purchasing costly storage area network disk space.

Free security tools:
Tripwire ConfigCheck – A free utility that rapidly assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.0 and 3.5 hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines.

Configuresoft Compliance Checker - A free tool that provides a real-time compliance check that can analyze multiple VMware ESX host servers at a time. Also provides detailed compliance checks against both the VMware Hardening Guidelines and the CIS benchmarks for ESX.

If you know of any other free tools that you use in your VMware environment, feel free to list them in the comments section of this post.

VMware vs. Hyper-V: Comparing apples to carrots

OK, I had to laugh at this one. A Microsoft blog references an article in which a company that predominantly runs Microsoft applications said that it received a $50,000 quote from VMware to virtualize 16 physical servers to four virtual hosts. It claims that the cost comprised $25,000 in software costs and $25,000 in installation costs. The article also said the company chose Hyper-V instead because it cost only $49 per server. The article didn’t mention anything about hardware costs so presumably the company already had hardware or planned to purchase it separately.

The $50,000 price tag was obviously very high. Most likely the quote was for at least one Enterprise license per server as well as VirtualCenter, which may have come out to $25,000 or so. The company claimed to only have a 10-15% CPU utilization rate on its current servers, so it could have easily gone with only two ESX hosts. However, it is possible that they needed four hosts for Hyper-V.

I have to wonder if the company realized what it would get for $25,000. The VMware option provides very robust and feature-rich Enterprise licenses along with a VirtualCenter management server. Comparing this to Hyper-V is like comparing apples to carrots: They aren’t even in the same family. I also wonder if it thought that all it would need to fork out was $49 per server and thus the whole project was going to cost $196 compared with $50,000. Apparently nobody informed it of the underlying requirement of a Windows Server 2008 license for each Hyper-V server. If the company were instead looking at the recently announced Hyper-V Server 2008, which is free, it missed the fact that ESXi is also free and would not have included licensing costs.

As far as $25,000 in installation costs, that seems extremely high for setting up four ESX hosts and performing physical-to-virtual conversions of existing servers to virtual machines. Without seeing the details of the quote it’s hard to say what the company would have paid for. It apparently had no virtualization experience whatsoever, because if it had, it wouldn’t pay someone to install and configure its servers. Presumably it would still have to pay someone to virtualize its environment on to Hyper-V servers. Unfortunately the article made no mention of those costs.

I have to give the company the benefit of the doubt. Was it merely a victim of someone trying to sell it way more than it needed or did the person who provided the quote not understand the company’s needs? It could have easily gone with ESXi servers for free and paid a reasonable amount to have someone help with the installation. If it wanted more features it could have also gone with one of the ESX Foundation Acceleration kits bundled with VirtualCenter for only $3,600. It’s a shame that the company was quoted such a high price. I know if I saw a price tag like that to virtualize a small environment I would balk at it too. However, while looking at other alternatives I would also ask why the quote was so high and try to understand exactly what the cost entailed. It sounds as if someone were trying to sell the company a bunch of Ferraris when all it really needed was a couple of mini-vans.

So without all the facts all we can do is guess, but this seems to be just another case of comparing apples to carrots in an attempt to exploit the so-called price issue between ESX and Hyper-V that doesn’t exist if you do a fair comparison between the two.

Where are the Microsoft Hyper-V users?

So, earlier this week I wrote a blog about Clabby Analytics Analyst Joe Clabby’s report spelling out a handful of reasons why Microsoft’s Hyper-V is going to take the lead in the virtualization market away from VMware Inc. over the next five years.

I received a lot of feedback on this blog from people defending VMware, and thought, why not get some Hyper-V users to talk to me about the product - how it performs, its related management tools, features, etc. I asked Microsoft’s press team to send some users my way for interviews, and about a week later Microsoft’s “Rapid Response” team sent me a couple of links to case studies.

Thanks, but I would like to interview some users myself, outside of Microsoft filters. How about at least sending me the contact info for the users profiled in these case studies?

Microsoft’s response was, “Unfortunately regarding direct contact information for the Hyper-V case studies, we have no further information to share.”

What? Really?

This strikes me as odd because Microsoft’s competition, VMware and even smaller virtualization companies like Virtual Iron refer me to real users to interview about their products.

Does this mean that Microsoft doesn’t have the same level of product confidence as the competition? VMware has offered plenty of customer references, and while those users do complain about the acquisition cost of VMware’s software, I don’t think I’ve heard any serious gripes about the product itself.

So I am interested in hearing from Hyper-V users about its performance, because as users and analysts have said, Microsoft won’t sail past VMware on price alone.

Six reasons Hyper-V will surpass VMware within five years

Clabby Analytics analyst Joe Clabby is 100% convinced that Microsoft’s Hyper-V will take over VMware in market share over the next three to five years, and makes some strong points for this in his recent report, Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace.

The report came out prior to the shake-up at VMware on July 8, when the company announced that its Board of Directors replaced VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was being replaced, and then lowered its revenue forecast.

VMware had the vision to see the value of virtualization and took the technology to the top unchallenged due to strategy, innovation and sales execution, but that ride is about to come to an end, Clabby said.

“With the introduction of Hyper-V by Microsoft, VMware is about to experience some very serious competition from a vendor with deep pockets, with a massive worldwide marketing and sales organization, with major market penetration across Fortune 500 and small and medium business markets, and with extensive and complementary infrastructure and management product depth,” Clabby reported.

Among the reasons Clabby believes Microsoft will crush VMware are that Microsoft already has an expansive installed base, a mammoth network of direct sales and indirect business partners, and is offering lower prices alternatives to VMware’s hypervisor and related infrastructure/management software products.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. History tends to repeat itself, and this has been Microsoft’s strategy for a very long time: see a great technology, copy it, and outprice the rest of the market.

Vanity Fair’s July issue had a great article that illustrates this, called “How the Web was Won” that looks at the eveolution of the Internet over the past 50 years, including details of how Microsoft took over Netscape Navigator by developing Internet Explorer.

The computer programmer known for founding Netscape Communications, Lou Montulli, told Vanity Fair, “From a scientific point of view none of us really respected Microsoft. There was definitely a sense of: They’ve put out of business three or four major companies, and they did it simply by copying what they did and outpricing or outmaneuvering them in the market. This is a general feeling of computer scientists everywhere, that Microsoft doesn’t tend to innovate as much and really just enters the market late, takes it over, and then stays at the top.”

Pricing aside, Microsoft already has a massive installed base.

“It will leverage this installed base, and price its products to out-function/undercut VMware’s pricing,” Clabby wrote. “The computing industry saw this same situation arise when Citrix built a leadership base for its terminal server products — only to have Microsoft enter the market and claim significant marketshare after Citrix pioneered the terminal server marke umbrella. Almost the exact same situation is about to happen again — this time between VMware and Microsoft.”

Microsoft also has a packaging advantage with its Hyper-V hypervisor, as it can be delivered with every single version of 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and installing Hyper-V is a cake walk, according to Clabby.

“A box simply needs to be checked during installation and Hyper-V becomes active. By not requiring IT buyers to find/acquire/download additional virtualization software, the job of deploying and testing virtualization within a Windows Server 2008 is greatly simplified. VMware cannot counter this packaging advantage,” Clabby wrote.

The most damning problem for VMware, according to Clabby, is product depth.

Though VMware has the advantage of technologies like VMotion, to move live VMs, and all of the handy add-on management and infrastructure software integrated into VMware, Clabby said Microsoft’s management and infrastructure is far deeper.

Microsoft’s Systems Center product portfolio inlcludes systems management tools like Configuration Manager; Operations Manager; Data Protection Manager; Virtual Machine Manager; System Center Essentials; Capacity Planner, and the list goes on, ad nauseum.

Besides all of those points, Microsoft is a $51 billion dollar software company and VMware’s revenue is just over $1 billion.

In short, given its deep pockets, large installed base and virtualization strategy, it is safe to say Microsoft will, once again, be laughing all the way to the bank.

Test virtual environments make for better server upgrades

Given that virtual environments for x86 servers are relatively new, most lack direct experience in performing major in-place upgrades. While there are many ways to approach a key upgrade to a virtual environment, we’ll take a look at one example of a server virtualization upgrade: VMware ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 to the Update 1 release of both products. This release resolved some major issues, putting the spotlight back on the new features of ESX 3.5, namely Storage VMotion.

Maintaining version control on a virtualization platform is in the best interest of ongoing administration. With VMware environments, this situation is illustrated by the sequential upgrade tasks with older versions of ESX and VirtualCenter. The first step in making a successful upgrade is to go through the release notes and scour the Internet for existing resources that can make this task less daunting. One particularly helpful resource is the RTFM Education ESX and VirtualCenter upgrade guide by Mike Laverick which goes through many scenarios with specific, step-by-step guides on almost every topic of the upgrade.

Having all of the resources in the world may still not be enough to ensure a smooth upgrade of the virtual environment. This is where a test environment for the upgrades can prove critical to a successful project. Provisioning an accurate test environment can become increasingly expensive, but can provide a beneficial test ground to ensure there are no surprises during the upgrade. Consider the test environment shown in the figure below:

This test environment is a smaller, yet representative environment of the larger environment in that it may have the same storage system, base drivers on the host systems yet simply providing a smaller workload. This environment can be an adequate test environment for all of the basic functions involved with an upgrade. As for provisioning the environment, there are some tricks available such as using the systems in an unlicensed or evaluation mode, reducing processor inventories or taking resources from the live environment if the loss can be sustained.

Planning and testing are the best defenses against an upgrade failure. Furthermore, because the scope of a virtual environment is so broad, the investment in testing and planning should be a no-brainer.

VMware virtualization used to cut costs at 900 universities

Attention, college students: your tuition may soon decrease!

Well, maybe not. However, VMware Inc. reported today that 900 universities including top tier schools such as Harvard and Yale are saving big bucks using VMware Inc. virtualization.

Many renowned universities that have deployed VMware to reduce capital and operating costs, increase application and system uptime, decrease power consumption and improve disaster preparedness include Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue, the University of Maryland, the University of Auckland, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego.

These schools and hundreds more around the world are running their mission-critical enterprise applications, database systems, and education-specific applications such as CollegeNET and the Blackboard Academic Suite in VMware virtualized environments, the company reported.

Others are using VMware for disaster recovery (DR).

Bowdoin College in Maine partnered with Los Angeles-based Loyola Marymount University to build a co-located datacenter for cross-country DR. By partnering and using VMware to create back-up systems, the schools have achieved higher availability and better load balancing, with more than 70% of their environment virtualized and more than 100 virtual machines (VM). They are saving $15,000 in annual server maintenance and have avoided $500,000 in hardware costs, according to VMware.

Ohio State University has been a VMware virtualizatiton customer since 2003 when the College of Humanities needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure and found there was not enough room to expand. After deploying VMware virtualization, the College was able to meet its upgrade needs with 54 VMs running on three physical host servers. The college avoided $160,000 in hardware costs and cut server provisioning time down from three weeks to five minutes, and the IT staff can now manage all of its VMware VMs from a single console.

Clearly, the education sector is a strong market for VMware, as there are now 900 universities and colleges using the virtualization platform. Because of this, VMware created a free online tool called VMware Academic Program staffed with IT professionals from higher education facilities to answer questions about overall IT best practices. In addition to these experts, the site also includes case studies to help understand how others have implemented VMware.

Virtual machines bleed money

This blog post was written by Megan Santosus, Features Writer.
A recent white paper published by Embotics Corp. on the hidden costs of virtual machines (VMs) paints just the kind of picture one might expect from a vendor of VM lifecycle management software. According to the paper, an IT shop with 150 virtual machines will typically spend between $50,000 and $150,000 on VMs that are redundant. Those costs stem from four areas: infrastructure (processing, storage, memory and the like); management systems (backup, change and configuration management, etc.); server software (licenses for operating systems and applications); and administration (labor and training). David Lynch, Embotics’ vice president of marketing, said that it’s not unusual for customers to discover that half of their VMs are redundant.
Are VMs really sieves leaking that much money?

Todd Monahan, data center manager at Alcatel/Lucent’s Ottawa, Ont., facility, (and an Embotics customer, although he didn’t talk about his own company’s experience), finds the white paper’s conclusions on the money, so to speak. Monahan estimates that typical licensing costs incurred by a data center for his size – 500 servers split 50:50 between physical and virtual boxes – to break down per machine as follows: Monitoring, $250 to $300; backup, $600 to $700; and operating system for standard Windows $600 to $700. Add on the application licensing costs that vary widely, and you’ve got quite a bit more than chump change at stake.

And as for half the number of VMs being unnecessary, that resonates with Monahan as well.

“It’s so easy to create VMs when you go through a consolidation exercise,” Monahan said. “And because you can’t see them, it really becomes an issue of out of sight, out of mind.”

VMware pushes desktop virtualization on management and security benefits

VMware Inc. Senior Director of Enterprise Desktops Gerald Chen visited our office on Tuesday morning to discuss the different types of desktop virtualization and answer common questions about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), for example, how it differs from terminal services and cost issues.

Here’s how VDI works: each end user gets a virtual machine (VM) that is deployed from a server in the data center directly to a PC, laptop or thin client computer. Each VM is customizable, so all of the user’s settings are saved and re-booted each time the user signs in, Chen said.

When a user logs off for the day, their VM goes idle, and wakes back up when the user logs into their system again, according to Chen. Chen believes that the advantage of VDI is that sensitive data is not being stored on desktops, which can easily be lost or stolen, and these virtual desktops are easier to manage than physical ones.

“VDI is great for industries like health care that are really concerned about information security and compliance. The real value though, is in management. All of the information is safe in the data center, and centrally managed through Virtual Infrastructure,” Chen said. “For instance, if you have 100 new employees who need desktops, you can deploy a VM for each of them in just minutes, and manage all of them centrally.”

VDI is different from Sever Based Computing (SBC) systems like Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenApp in that VDI is connects a single user to a single operating system (OS), instead of having multiple users share one OS.

“Not every application likes to share an OS, and there is also bad isolation; if one application crashes, everyone sharing that OS crashes as well. Those desktops can’t be customized either. It is a locked environment.”

Chen went on to explain that with VDI, four to ten VMs per server core are supported, so a server with one quad-core processor can, theoretically, house 40 VMs. Of course, that varies depending on things like workload, applications and memory. If the VMs become too heavy for the server to handle, management features in VI3 intervene. VMotion can move live VMs from one server to another when capacity issues arise, as can Dynamic Resource Scheduler, which allocates and balances computing resources as needed using VMotion.

Desktop virtualization case study
As VMware announced customer case studies in February, including one at Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama.

The hospital needed to implement a new medical information application throughout its network while protecting HIPAA-related data. Deploying hosted desktops on VMware, the hospital could lock down sensitive patient data and reduce the cost and complexity of desktop management.

They used combinations of thin clients and blade servers to access the centralized virtual desktops, and in turn, reduced power consumption across the hospital by 78%, improved longevity with lower hardware maintenance needs and made wireless thin clients on wheeled carts available to hospital staff. Also, doctors can remotely access their VMs through the Internet using a web browser when necessary.

The downside to desktop virtualization
While the benefits are clear, there are some downsides to desktop virtualization: extra storage and initial cost.

Chen told SearchServerVirtualization.com that VMware is working on reducing image sizes and has designed a way to keep only one copy of files that are identical among many users, like icons and other graphics, to reduce the amount of storage necessary.

The cost of implementing desktop virtualization turns users off. According to Ars Open Forum blogger ‘Bright Wire,’ the cost and the magnitude of system upgrades required is not worth the benefits.

“The cost of deploying virtual desktops is massive,” Bright Wire wrote. “You will need to re-gear your existing desktops to run the virtual or you will need vendor equipment that costs twice as much as a new desktop. Either way, the cost is big in manpower. On top of that, your infrastructure will need serious review.”

According to VMware’s product specifications, local desktop virtualization requires a 500 MHz or faster processor with recommended 256 MB of memory, though Forrester reports that PCs must be faster and have more RAM to work efficiently.

“In addition you need to look into the server infrastructure,” Bright Wire said. “You are talking about needing a lot of iron on the backside to handle the needs of the server to supply two to 16 desktops. All this adds up quickly and can easily swamp a datacenter.”

As for pricing complaints, VMware is used to hearing them and holds firm to the ‘you get what you pay for’ mantra, saying the management benefits are worth the price.

The company charges $150 per concurrent user plus additional costs for support, either Gold or Platinum levels. Both bundles include VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition for VDI (which consists of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5) and the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2. The VMware VDI Starter Edition, which enables 10 virtual desktops, has a list price of $1,500. The VMware VDI Bundle 100 Pack, which enables 100 virtual desktops, has a list price of $15,000.

The market indicates a demand for desktop virtualization, as a number of other vendors also entered the desktop virtualization space including Sun Microsystems Inc., Citrix., Pano Logic Inc. and Symantec. Chen would argue that many customers come for reduction in hardware but stay for the management applications.

“Reducing hardware costs is not a reason to use VDI, it is management. We have customers who have seen 40% to 50% ROI in terms of management costs and the amount of time it frees up.”