These changes will further blur the line between a virtual data center and a cloud infrastructure, said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s vice president of product marketing. During an interview at VMworld 2011, he explained VMware’s vSphere roadmap in terms of three expanding circles, starting at the host, then moving out to the cluster and ending at the data center/cloud level:

Host-level changes: The ESXi hypervisor will support future types of workloads that require more host resources. These workloads will be different than the client/server applications that a majority of VMware users run today, Balkansky said.

Cluster improvements: VMware will continue to increase the number of hosts a vSphere cluster can support, as well as stretching clusters over longer geographical distances. The company, along with Cisco Systems, is already focusing on this area with the new VXLAN technology, which aims to improve virtual machine (VM) mobility across multiple data centers. Having larger clusters with the ability to live-migrate VMs across longer distances has numerous benefits, including increased flexibility and disaster recovery capabilities.

Data centers and clouds: VMware plans to provide more automation for the movement of workloads among data centers and clouds, Balkansky said. This initiative is closely related to the clustering improvements, but orchestration deals more with the policies that govern which workloads run on which hosts. These rules must account for security and compliance considerations, as well as expected levels of performances, Balkansky said.

VMware will implement these vSphere changes gradually in future releases, Balkansky said. So don’t expect all of this functionality in vSphere 5.1 or even vSphere 6.

In companies that deploy both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, 71% have difficulties managing both hypervisors from a single console, according to a recent Veeam Software survey. Also, 68% of the 253 CIOs who responded said it’s becoming more important to be able to manage both hypervisors from a single interface.

This was a vendor-driven survey, and Veeam has recently touted the importance of multiple-hypervisor management. But it’s no secret that there’s a gap between what users want and what virtualization management tools deliver — especially those tools from platform vendors and systems management providers.

VMware management

Until very recently, multiple-platform management wasn’t even in VMware’s vocabulary. VCenter manages only vSphere, but there have been whispers that it may eventually support Hyper-V and Xen. And it’s now possible to manage Hyper-V with XVP Manager, an unofficial VMware Labs fling that installs as a vCenter plug-in.

XVP Manager points to a larger issue for VMware: Its management philosophy is scattered. Over the past couple of years, the company has made a flurry of acquisitions targeted at improving virtualization management. And it should be commended for its virtualization-first approach to infrastructure management. But the way VMware has integrated features and capabilities into vCenter has left some users confounded.

VCenter Operations, which incorporates technologies from the Integrien and Ionix purchases, remedies some of these product-integration issues by providing essential management capabilities from a single pane of glass. Then again, vCenter Operations offers some performance-monitoring and capacity-planning features that are found in other vCenter products — which harkens back to VMware’s disjoined management approach.

Overall, VMware offers a dizzying array of vCenter add-ons, a lot of which are strong in their own right. But using multiple vCenter products is not only expensive, but also difficult to navigate.

Microsoft management

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s virtualization management tools are playing catch-up with VMware. The release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 will finally bring several vSphere-like features to Hyper-V, such as distributed resource scheduling and power management. But even with support for Hyper-V, vSphere and Citrix Systems XenServer — and the added capabilities from other System Center products — SCVMM 2012 can’t be everything to everyone.

The Big Four

Don’t look to traditional, physical infrastructure tools to completely solve your management woes, either. Many users say data center management products from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software and CA are geared more toward physical servers than their virtual counterparts. And most of these systems management products aren’t virtually aware, meaning that they lack the granularity and sophistication required to control a dense virtual infrastructure.

As a result, some companies are turning to open source tools for virtualization management, but it’s not all puppies and candy canes with open source tools, either. Developing features in-house requires expertise and a development philosophy, which may not be possible for SMBs.

Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine that there will be one, broad virtualization management tool to rule them all, because each infrastructure has specific requirements and workloads. It’s clear, however, that vendors and users realize that virtualization management isn’t where it needs to be.

Today, a little bird sent me a link to a freshly posted job req from Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP)’s 3PAR storage division that mentions an acronym identical to the one sources gave me for that story, though what the letters “VASA” actually stand for in this description is slightly different from what I had reported earlier…

3PAR-HP StorageWorks Division, the leader in enterprise level cloud SAN/storage, is seeking a Staff Certification Test Engineer to cover new certification requirements of VMware VASA. In this position you will be responsible for planning and executing 3rd party partner certification testing of the 3PAR InServ storage array with VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) [boldface emphasis mine] and other partner ecosystem products. The products to certify will include VMware vSphere, Symantec Storage Foundation, Microsoft Windows, and Citrix XenServer.

You will be required to perform certification testing using partner supplied test suites and following partner guidelines. You will be required to investigate and troubleshoot issues found during testing, and prepare status to other 3PAR test engineers and management.

Previously, sources had said VASA stood for “VMware Aware Storage APIs.”

But that’s a relatively minor semantic quibble — otherwise, signs keep pointing to new integration between vSphere and storage arrays sometime this year. Judging by the timing of HP / 3PAR’s call for additional staff, the APIs may have already been made avilable to partners, but sources don’t expect new product features to appear publicly until later in the year.

Those numbers come from our “Virtualization Decisions 2010 Purchasing Intentions Survey,” but they’re just scratching the surface. We also have a breakdown by specific platform, and here are those numbers:

What is your primary virtualization platform?

VMware

Microsoft

Just 3.8% of respondents identified XenServer, in case you’re wondering, and no other option got much above 1%.

One thing to note is that vSphere and Hyper-V R2 came out within just months of each other. VSphere is the leading primary platform now, while Hyper-V R2 fares only slightly better than legacy VMware platforms.

These results show that VMware’s lengthy head start in the server virtualization market is still a big advantage. When a new product comes out, much of VMware’s large customer base will adopt it rather quickly. Microsoft doesn’t have that large, loyal following, and it shows when you look at these numbers.

In early July, John Troyer and Luke Kilpatrick of VMware’s Social Media Team took some time out –nearly four minutes, in fact — to demo the VMworld 2010 backpack. They took us through the backpack’s paces — from its compartments for floppy disks (doesn’t everyone bring thumb drives? It’s 2010), pencils, and even an iPhone as well as its environmentally friendly accompaniment, a metal water bottle, and the improved zipper pulls over the 2009 model. The demo was thorough, if a little uncomfortable.

And for those who haven’t yet gleaned the backpack’s value, a Blades Made Simple post made the plea for attendees to recycle undesired packs to needy kids. I have to admit, I gave mine to a friend last year.

The video did bring pause, though. VMware faces some tough challenges over the next couple of years. It has yet to articulate a coherent cloud computing strategy that even its high-end users understand. The latest release of vSphere will be the last to support ESX, compelling users to migrate to the management console-less ESXi hypervisor, which will be an adjustment. And of course, Microsoft’s Hyper-V has become a viable alternative to the higher-priced VMware. Does the focus on backpacks indicate some displaced anxiety?

I look forward to seeing you at the show, and check out our VMworld 2010 coverage here.

Cloud computing is the main theme at this week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and Hyper-V has taken a backseat to Windows Azure. The focus on Azure, a Platform as a Service (PaaS), marks a significantly different approach to private clouds than VMware has taken with its cloud infrastructure model.

And it means that when we talk about the battle between VMware and Microsoft, the folks in Redmond want us to talk less about vSphere vs. Hyper-V and more about vSphere vs. Azure.

Go to any VMware show and you’ll hear that vSphere, its virtual infrastructure product, is the foundation for building a private cloud. But during his WPC keynote yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “The difference between a cloud infrastructure and a virtual infrastructure is dramatic.” (Of course, as our senior news director Barbara Darrow wrote, “That’s what I would say too if I were trying to displace the VMware juggernaut.”)

Furthering Ballmer’s message, Microsoft’s Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of server and tools marketing, told me yesterday, “The heart of a cloud is Platform as a Service. … Infrastructure as a Service is a feature of a cloud platform, but it’s just a feature.”

Azure has strictly been a public cloud platform, focused on developers, but that changed yesterday when Microsoft announced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Hyper-V will be part of the platform, but it’s unclear exactly how much.*

Framed this way, Microsoft’s approach to virtualization and private clouds seems very comprehensive. But it’s a long ways off for most customers — even Wahbe acknowledged that the infrastructure piece, which is VMware’s focus, is “where people are today” — and Azure and Hyper-V are still relatively new products.

Will this approach help Microsoft catch up to VMware? Maybe, but not anytime soon.

*For some reason, Wahbe and other Microsoft execs were reluctant to say that Azure is “based on Hyper-V,” instead saying that its virtualization technology uses Hyper-V, System Center and Windows Server. I’m not sure what the difference is, but apparently there is one. And in case you were wondering, the appliance won’t support VMware, Wahbe said.

Users on the VMware Communities forum and other message boards said the patch prevented them from logging into the vSphere Client — both on Windows 7 and XP. (The patch addresses a vulnerability that leaves signed XML data open to tampering.)

Some users overcame this problem by uninstalling the patch (identified as KB980773, part of update KB982168), which obviously isn’t ideal. But the better solution is to install the latest version of vSphere Client 4.0 Update 1.

Did you run into this problem yesterday? Did that solution work for you? Let us know in the comments below.

No dice? How about this instead: Write a virtualization-themed limerick, and you could win a vSphere training video.

We have a copy of TrainSignal’s latest video, “VMware vSphere Pro Series Vol. 1,” and a copy of “VMware vSphere Training” as well. If you want one of them, follow these rules:

• Write an original limerick about virtualization. If you don’t know what a limerick is, click here.
• Make sure it’s clean, because we’re going to publish them.
• Email it to me at csteele@techtarget.com, along with your full name and mailing address (in case you win), by Friday, March 12.

On St. Patrick’s Day we’ll publish the best limericks and choose two winners at random.

“VMware vSphere Pro Series Vol. 1″ features 18 lessons from VMware vExperts David Davis, Rick Scherer and Hal Rottenberg. Topics covered include VMware View, the Cisco Nexus 1000V and PowerCLI. “VMware vSphere Training” offers 19 videos on all aspects of vSphere.

Rob McShinsky, senior systems engineer at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, would love to find the Sanbolic Melio FS under his IT department’s tree. The hospital is virtualized on a combination of Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2, and the Melio FS file system will provide improved, VMware-like disk management for the original Hyper-V platform, he said.

“It will allow us to get rid of the disk bloat that Hyper-V R1 had,” he added.

McShinsky also ho-ho-hopes for BL460c G6 blade servers from Hewlett-Packard with Intel Nehalem processors. Dartmouth Hitchock runs G5 blades now, but the G6 blades offer “lots more power in a small package for virtualization,” he said.

The final item on McShinsky’s wish list is a backup and deduplication solution from Data Domain. The hospital has 17 TB of data backed up in its virtual environment alone.

“We’re thinking we can boil that down to a third of that,” McShinsky said.

Storage is also a hot technology for Rick Vanover, IT infrastructure manager at Alliance Data. He bought himself an early present for his personal test lab: a DroboPro iSCSI device from Data Robotics.

“I’m really excited about that,” Vanover said. “It’s iSCSI, it’s expandable storage, and it has a pretty slick RAID algorithm.”

The device will also be compatible with VMware vSphere 4 in the future, which fits with Vanover’s upgrade plans.

“That’s a great resource so that I don’t have to rebuild stuff so frequently,” he said. “I could buy a new server, but this is half the price of a new server.”

And in the office, a great present would be vSphere training for the full IT staff, Vanover said. Although vSphere upgrades are relatively painless, the platform itself has some significant differences from its predecessor.

“It’s the new computer, and we need to make sure we’re doing it right,” Vanover said.

The release comes a month after the Hyper-V R2 RTM. Microsoft has been stressing that the biggest Hyper-V R2 benefits will come when used in conjunction with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2, and this release shows that the two products are roughly on the same track. (VMM 2008 R2 will hit general availability Oct. 1, and Hyper-V R2 is expected to do so sometime in September.)

But it’s important to note that Microsoft isn’t targeting just Hyper-V users with VMM 2008 R2. The software will also support VMware vSphere 4.