The new calculator’s results, highlighted by Microsoft in a gloating blog post, show vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus as 19% more expensive than Hyper-V 3.0 with System Center 2012 when running 100 virtual machines (VMs) with an iSCSI SAN. Other configurations, such as running 150 VMs on NAS, also show VMware to be more expensive (by 6% in that particular case).

While embarrassing for VMware, this development is just one tiny part of bickering that has been going on for quite a while. And even these favorable calculator results are not good enough for Microsoft. In last week’s blog post, VMware’s rival insisted the findings are still off, particularly when the full vCloud Suite is taken into account.

Has anything really changed?

This summer’s SearchServerVirtualization.com special report on VMware and Hyper-V pricing and licensing found that the actual overall cost for the two platforms depends heavily on the size of the IT shop and the type of workload being virtualized.

It also found that the story doesn’t end there. For one thing, public-facing cost calculators are based on list prices, which enterprises rarely pay, thanks to Microsoft and VMware’s deep discounts.

Some shops may find the cost savings enticing enough to swap out one hypervisor for another, but VMware also remains the incumbent vendor in most enterprise shops, and the costs of switching have many users saying Microsoft’s savings aren’t worth it.

It’s also important to remember that VMware and Hyper-V don’t match feature for feature, especially with several of Windows Server 2012’s Hyper-V advanced features still waiting on System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 to be put to the test.

VMware has not responded to multiple requests for comment about its online calculator.

Update: VMware published a blog post yesterday called “Flawed Logic Behind Microsoft’s Virtualization and Private Cloud Cost Comparisons” which says that in the more common configuration of 128 GB memory server hardware, VMware vSphere remains on par with or cheaper than Hyper-V, and concludes that the Microsoft blog post pointing out the calculator’s findings “is yet another attempt to artificially inflate VMware’s prices and distract customers from the shortcomings of their own products.”

Recently, I had a situation where an older OS had been removed from the installable toolkit platform — in this case it was VMware Tools. The older operating system, Windows ’98, had been removed from the VMware Tools installation with the release of VMware Server 2.0. While the need for a Windows ’98 virtual machine is rare, it does exist.

To solve the immediate problem, I was able to install a VMware Tools .ISO image from the 1.0.3 version of VMware Server that I’d been using on another host system. Once installed, the older tools are listed as ‘out of date’ as expected, but the basic features of driver optimization are present on the guest VM.

At first this dilemma did not appear to be much of an ordeal, but it started an important thought process. While Windows ’98 was the first occurrence of platform removal from a guest toolkit installation that I have observed directly, I don’t expect Windows NT or 2000 guestOSes to be that far from the chopping block of supported platforms.

One way to prevent this issue is to hold onto the tools installations for each platform of the hypervisor. VMware Tools, XenTools and Hyper-V Integration Services all exist as virtual CD-ROM .ISO images that you can hold onto for re-installation on another guest VM. Also, keep in mind that there may not be support from the host side either, so check to see which supported guest operating systems are available.

As you might expect, configuring an environment in this fashion may be met with some skepticism, as it could possibly divert resources. As a result, it may be worth placing this type of guest workload on a free hypervisor like VMware Server or on a similar lower tier of virtualization and storage. Having a flat file backup (.VMDK or .VHD) of the VM is a good idea as well.

While this situation is less than ideal for truly obsolete guest operating systems, the rare instance may arise where archiving toolkits can prove very beneficial.

• Integration Services are installed via virtual CD – For default installations, the C:\windows\system32\ path of the Hyper-V server contains the guest.iso file. This virtual CD provides the installation of Integration Services and is launched from the Action menu on the virtual machine as shown below:

• Integration Services are native on some platforms - Selected releases of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are Integration Services aware and do not need to be installed specifically.

• New Services and the Control Panel - Integrations Services shows up as Hyper-V Guest Components in the Control Panel and installs five Windows-based services. These are Hyper-V Data Exchange Service, Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service, Hyper-V Heartbeat Service, Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service and Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requestor. These Windows-based services exist in the task manager as vmicsvc.exe.

• Ease of Use – The installation of Integration Services permits the full use of Hyper-V Manager through remote desktop connections. Without this installation, interaction with the guest VM within Hyper-V Manager through a remote desktop from a different system will not permit mouse use.

Installing the hypervisor driver packages, such as VMware Tools, VirtualBox Guest Additions or Hyper-V Integration Services is always a wise decision in order to optimize the experience for guest systems. The configuration and setup of Integrations Services is very light, and can be managed much like the other driver packages. More information on Hyper-V can be found on the Microsoft website.

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.

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.

Blades have come a long way since the early days of very few options and limited expandability. Most early blade servers only had one or two NICs, limited storage, no Fibre Channel support, and limited CPU and memory, which made them poor choices for virtual hosts. That’s all changed in recent years as blade technology has evolved and no longer has the limitations of earlier blades, making them ideal for virtual host servers. Modern blade servers can support up to 16 NICs, four quad-core processors and multiple Fibre Channel or iSCSI HBA adapters. When considering blade servers in your environment as an alternative to traditional rack mount servers, you need to know the advantages and disadvantages of each and why you might choose one type over another.

Some reasons you might choose blade servers over traditional servers:

• Rack density is better for data centers where space is a concern. Up to 50% more servers can be installed in a standard 42U rack compared with traditional servers.
• Blade servers provide easier cable management as they simply connect to a chassis and need no additional cable connections.
• Blade servers have lower power consumption than traditional servers because of reduced power and cooling requirements.
• Blade servers can be cheaper than traditional servers when comparing a fully populated chassis with the equivalent number of traditional servers.

Some reasons you might choose traditional servers over blade servers:

• Traditional servers have more internal capacity for local disk storage. Blade servers typically have limited local disk storage capacity due to the limited drive bays. Some blade vendors now have separate storage blades to expand blade storage, but this takes up additional slots in the blade chassis.
• Traditional servers have more expansion slots available for network and storage adapters. Blade servers typically have very few or no expansion slots. Virtual hosts are often configured with many NICs to support the console network, vmKernel network, network-attached storage and virtual machine networks. Additional network adapters are also needed to provide failover and load balancing.
• Once a chassis is full, purchasing a new chassis to add a single new additional server can be costly. Traditional servers can be installed without any additional infrastructure components.
• Traditional servers are often less complicated to set up and manage than blade servers.
• Traditional servers have multiple USB ports for connecting external devices and also an optical drive for loading software on the host. They also have serial and parallel ports, which are sometimes used for hardware dongles for licensing software. Additionally, tape backup devices can be installed in them. Blade servers make use of virtual devices that are managed through the embedded hardware management interfaces.

Many people that use blade servers as virtual hosts often take advantage of the boot-from-SAN feature so they don’t need internal storage on their blade servers. The choice between blade and traditional servers often comes down to personal preference and what type of server is already in use in your data center. Some people like blades, others don’t. Regardless of which server type you choose, they both work equally well as virtual hosts.

The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with the new features including:

* Power management in the hypervisor
* Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) emulation domains for better scalability, performance and security
* Shadow pagetable improvements for the best HVM performance ever
* Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements
* Device passthrough enhancements
* CPUID feature levelling that allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models (within the same vendor brand – Intel or AMD)

Xen 3.3 provides virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 also supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, like Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT).

With Xen’s memory ballooning feature, the hypervisor can reallocate memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs) to guarantee performance and allow greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 also offers CPU portability to allow live migration of VMs across different CPUs, active power optimization to reduce server power consumption, and significant security enhancements.

Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems, said in a statement, “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems – and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.”

In addition to its growing development community, Xen hypervisor is the standard virtualization platform used by cloud computing providers like Amazon.com. It is also used in virtualization products from Citrix (XenServer), Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle (Oracle VM), Sun Microsystems (Sun xVM), and Virtual Iron, and is available as an embedded option in many x86 servers.

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.

RGH, a community-based teaching hospital, has an IT infrastructure supporting business applications and patient-critical systems as well as massive amounts of data storage that is growing exponentially.

“We started using virtualization to address power and space issues in our main datacenter. We quickly adopted VMWare ESX as our standard platform for new projects and consolidated existing servers,” Tom Gibaud, an IT manager at RGH, said in an email. “It allowed us to continue business as usual and we experienced no delay in completing projects on time. Today we are way below our power threshold and gained about 50% of our floor space even after we doubled the amount of Windows Servers.”

In VMware’s statement, VMware Infrastructure has improved application performance and availability, and strengthened the hospital’s disaster-recovery capabilities. “Before going virtual, our datacenter power supply was maxed out. We couldn’t plug in a toaster. Now, with less hardware, we have capacity to handle whatever comes our way,” Gibaud said.

The hospital now runs 50 virtual machine hosts running 400 Guests with a mix of large and small workloads including terminal services, Gibaud said. In all, RGH has virtualized about 95% of its Windows-based applications, including Exchange, SQL Server, the ClinicalCare portal that physicians and nurses use to access electronic medical records, and RGH’s billing system.

In the initial phase of the virtualization deployment, Gibaud said the hospital used IBM Bladecenter servers (HS20, HS21, LS20). “This allowed us to condense many servers is a small amount of space. With VMware and IBM Bladecenters we were able to consolidate over a 150 Servers into one rack,” he said. “Today we use IBM x3850 and HP DL580 G5 to handle larger server workloads.”

In addtion, the hospital is running 200 Windows XP desktops using VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on just two IBM x3850′s.

Modifyvm parameter
Probably one of the more versatile commands for VBoxManage is modifyvm. This parameter can set memory, operating system type, pae settings, monitor quantity, hardware inventory as well as snapshot configuration. Here is a sample command that sets a memory amount, makes the CD-ROM disk the first boot device and disables USB support:

vboxmanage modifyvm XP-TestSystem -memory 512 -boot1 dvd -usb off

The modifyvm parameter also has extended options such as BIOS display time, network interface driver type, host network interface assigned to the VM and enabling or disabling of the clipboard. Overall, modifyvm has over 50 parameters for an individual VM.

Controlvm parameter
From an automation standpoint, the controlvm parameter would be used to start a VM at host system boot. Controlvm can also be used to attach USB or DVD devices. The entry below will disconnect the media of the two virtual Ethernet adapters and reset the power state:

vboxmanage controlvm XP-TestSystem reset setlinkstate1 off
vboxmanage controlvm XP-TestSystem setlinkstate2 off

Note that in the case of an inventory of multiple devices of the same type, a separate entry would be required as in the case of disabling the network interface.

Snapshot parameter
The snapshot parameter can be used to manage all elements of a snapshot. In the case of a frequently used test system, it may be a good idea to automate the change back to the base snapshot. The following command would revert a VM to the existing snapshot:

vboxmanage snapshot XP-TestSystem discardcurrent -state

This command cannot be executed while the VM is running, yet a leading with a power down controlvm parameter can get the system to a state where running the snapshot parameter will do the trick.

Powerful Stuff
This is a very quick sample of what is capable with the VBoxManage command. I don’t know of anything that can be done in the interface that cannot be done with this command. VBoxManage commands also interact the same way across different platforms of xVM VirtualBox. This flexibility offers a compelling solution for an automated deployable solution at the zero-cost of xVM VirtualBox. The online user manual has the entire chapter 8 dedicated to the VBoxManage command, which can be downloaded from the VirtualBox website.