Is hypervisor competition really just about the hypervisor?

Will VMware eventually lose it’s market leadership position among hypervisor vendors? Several articles I have read recently speculate that, with offerings from Microsoft, Citrix and a handful of others, VMware’s days at the top are limited. Many reason that competition will ultimately force VMware to lower prices because so many options mean that the hypervisor will no longer be specialized technology, but instead become a commoditized offering companies can get from anyone and everyone. Another argument is that VMware’s current pricing is unattractive to small to medium sized business (SMB). The consensus among analysts is that the virtualization opportunity is still relatively untapped for SMBs, and the competition has the advantage due to price.

Maybe it’s because I just spent a week at the VMware Partner Exchange in San Diego and I am full of the VMware “Kool Aid”, but it appears to me that VMware has a pretty good strategy, focus and direction for staying ahead of the competition. While other vendors are still perfecting and marketing their hypervisor, VMware is talking about automation and management of the virtual data center with products like Site Recovery Manager, Lab Manager, Stage Manager, and Lifecycle Manager. Secondly, VMware is “winding up” it’s partners by providing incentives in the form of margins, programs, and intellectual collateral. You did not have to attend the Partner Exchange to realize this. VMware’s recent acquisitions, new product betas and announcements, and public communications have have shown this for some time now.

If hypervisor competition is really just about the hypervisor, or more specifically consolidating multiple physical servers on to a single virtualization host, then I have to agree that VMware will has some legit challengers. VMware ESXi (previously ESX3i) and the free VMware Server, however, continue to be the products well positioned to compete for the “I just want to squeeze as many guests as possible on a host” business. Let’s face it, VMware established this several years ago with the ESX 2.x product, and this is where most of the competition is entering the market today.

As far as the untapped market, if the hypervisor is truly all that SMBs want or can afford then VMware has it covered. Dell appears to have set the market pricing for the embedded hypervisor offerings just last week, and surprise, ESXi is the cheapest option! For $99 extra you can order new hardware pre-installed with the VMware hypervisor. Assuming all hardware manufacturers follow with similar competitive pricing, don’t be surprised if ESXi quickly becomes the most frequently used virtualization host in the data center - SMB or Enterprise.

Desktop virtualization is still a mixed bag

During a session on desktop virtualization at the VMware virtualization forum in New York last week it became clear that many hurdles still hinder adoption of what Gartner called in 2004 the next disruptive PC technology.

How much does desktop virtualization really save?
Kicking off the session was NEC departmental servers director Ken Hertzler who went through the usual sponsor sales pitch mixed in with some moderately interesting statistics in hopes of making the case for desktop virtualization. When businesses hand out laptops to employees, they are actually making a bigger investment than the few hundred dollars for the machine. NEC puts management costs somewhere around $4500 over a three year period; and those costs are rising. Of course, Hertzler identified desktop virtualization as the key to reducing those costs.

Mark A. Margevicius is the research director at Stamford, Conn.-based research organization Gartner, and he agreed that businesses can save by deploying virtual desktops. He said that quantifying exactly how much savings, however, can be sticky. “On average, our customers save two to 12% from a TCO perspective,” he said. Measuring total cost of ownership makes it difficult to pin down savings. For example, how do you measure how much you save in PC uptime? Or, to put it another way, how often do non-virtual PCs go down?

But it isn’t just about the cost of maintaining remote workers. The security risks are often enormous. Hertzler cited a local banking firm that estimates the cost of a lost or stolen laptop in the neighborhood of $50,000 when it’s all said and done. Although Margevicius wasn’t surprised by this number, he said that every organization measures these expenses differently. “You could argue that losing the laptop you gave to the janitor to play solitare with would result in high cost,” he said.

For Margevicius, it’s all about the capital costs versus TCO to which people need to pay attention. Most customers get hung up on capital costs, i.e. the investment it takes to get things going. What many people are realizing, however, is that desktop virtualization is a shared resource and that many of the savings come in the form of things like higher levels of redundancy.

Hardware requirements coming to the forefront
After throwing out some scary numbers, Hertzler ended with a demonstration of NEC’s desktop virtualization server designed specifically for use in VMware virtual desktop environments. The crowning feature of the server is its fault tolerance and automatic failover capability. In fact, Hertzler had been running his entire presentation on a virtual machine hosted on one of these very servers.

He asked a volunteer to unplug the power, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, the server automatically failed over to the backup with no interruption to the single VM running an instance of Power Point and what looked like Windows Explorer. Sweetening the deal was the nearly unnoticeable 30 seconds before he could open his applications back up–very impressive.

But it wasn’t the server technology, per se, that Margevicius was concerned about—it’s storage. “Most people at minimum take for granted the amount of storage a PC has. People expect 80, 10, 250 gigs of local storage as part of the platform,” he said, it goes back to the question of capital costs. “How much storage do you allocate in your data center [for local storage on virtual PCs]?” This, again, is a question of how much capital cost you want to invest in your virtual infrastructure.

Are we ready for desktop virtualization?
Gartner still sees maturity as a major hurdle. Although Mark acknowledges the progress made by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, components such as software and brokering technology still need to be addressed and improved.

The question of maturity is raised in terms of scalability. Most deployments are still in the area of 100 or so virtual desktops and many of those are still in pilot or testing. Although he couldn’t release names, Mark said that he knows of a handful of people who’ve “gotten religion” over virtual infrastructure and who have plans to move into the 500-1000 virtual desktop range with the end goal of an entire virtual desktop architecture.

VMware releases management and automation products, new bundles

Palo Alto-based VMware, Inc. made three product announcements today; its disaster recovery software, VMware Site Recovery Manager will be available for orders next week, VMware Stage Manager will begin shipping May 19th, and these products will also be available as part of two new management and automation software bundles from VMware starting May 19th.

Site Recovery Manager
VMware Site Recovery Manager, which provides integrated management of disaster recovery (DR) plans with VirtualCenter, offers automated DR plan testing, failover and recovery.

Jon Bock, senior product marketing manager for VMware, said that Site Recovery Manager should allow users to implement DR plans where they could not do so before.

“Because of cost and resources required for DR, disaster recovery has only been done for mission critical applications, but virtualized workloads can be protected with minimal cost and effort,” Bock said.

More and more companies have started virtualizing mission critical workloads, as VMware has been quick to point out.

The company presented a number of case studies showing companies like Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc., which uses virtual machines (VMs) for “almost everything” including its Microsoft SQL database, EMC Corp.’s Documentum, and Active Directory, with success.

Companies virtualizing those types of apps should use DR capabilities from software like VMware’s to protect those applications during disaster.

Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group analyst and virtualization expert Chris Wolf explained in a tip recently that Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery planning and execution simple.

“With Site Recover Manager, you can automate your disaster recovery plan with software, initiate that plan with a mouse click, and pre-program the sequence in which VMs are brought online at a disaster recovery site,” Wolf wrote. “During the course of this year, I expect other vendors to offer similar technologies as well.”

Stage Manager
VMware Stage Manager automates the process of moving application environments through release stages — from integration to testing to staging and to user acceptance — before being released into production.

Stage Manager, which was highly acclaimed during its beta phase, is also managed by VMware Infrastructure 3. It aims to reduce time spent on configuring hardware and prevent virtual machine sprawl, which commonly occurs when virtual machines are released across the data center for staging, Bock said.

New management and automation bundles

VMware has designed two new software bundles that include the management and automation products now available. The VMware IT Service Delivery Bundle includes all of VMware’s IT lifecyle automation products, including VMware Lifecycle Manager, VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage Manager.
The VMware Management and Automation Bundle includes all of the above, plus the disaster recovery product VMware Site Recovery Manager. It is priced at $2,995 per two processors.

The new Management and Automation Bundle includes all products from the IT Service Delivery Bundle with the addition of VMware Site Recovery Manager, priced at $3,995 per two processors.

Both software bundles will be available form VMware distributors, resellers and OEMs beginning May 19.

VMotion and RDMs

Yesterday I was a speaker at “Virtualization: Getting from Pilot to Production.” During my second session I claimed that you could VMotion a virtual machine (VM) that uses a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) to access a raw logical unit number (LUN). Two audience members challenged this claim, saying that they had previously run into a scenario where it was not possible to VMotion a VM that makes use of RDMs. I was sure I was right, and they were positive they were correct. It turns out we were *all* spot on. You can VMotion a VM that uses RDM as long as the RDM is configured in virtual compatibility mode. When you map a SAN LUN using a RDM, you choose between two modes of operation: physical and virtual. Per VMware documentation:

Virtual mode for an RDM specifies full virtualization of the mapped device. It appears to the guest operating system exactly the same as a virtual disk file in a VMFS volume. The real hardware characteristics are hidden. Virtual mode allows customers using raw disks to realize the benefits of VMFS such as advanced file locking for data protection and snapshots for streamlining development processes. Virtual mode is also more portable across storage hardware than physical mode, presenting the same behavior as a virtual disk file.

Physical mode for the RDM specifies minimal SCSI virtualization of the mapped device, allowing the greatest flexibility for SAN management software. In physical mode, the VMkernel passes all SCSI commands to the device, with one exception: the REPORT LUNs command is virtualized, so that the VMkernel can isolate the LUN for the owning virtual machine. Otherwise, all physical characteristics of the underlying hardware are exposed. Physical mode is useful to run SAN management agents or other SCSI target based software in the virtual machine. Physical mode also allows virtual-to-physical clustering for cost-effective high availability.

Additionally, you can also VMotion a VM with an RDM that uses network port ID virtualization (NPIV), as long as you use virtual compatability mode.

So there you have it. The audience members were right. My memory is not as shot as I thought it was, and everyone is happy.

Why you should upgrade to VI3 Update 1

VMware Infrastructure 3 Update 1, made available on April 10 2008, introduces some core updates to ESX Server 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5, and the VMware Infrastructure Management Installer. The biggest reason to upgrade, however, is the inclusion of Storage VMotion.

Among the core features now available with ESX 3.5 Update 1 are the addition of the Intel 82598 10 GB Ethernet controller, support of Jumbo Frames and NetQueue, additional Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) support, additional backup product and management agent support, additional guest operating systems, and additional server models.

I’ve been working with ESX 3.5 Update 1 for a few weeks, and the installation and behavior are indistinguishable from both ESX 3.5’s base release and ESX 3.02, with the exception of context sensitive tasks or options.

When I test upgrades, I make a point to test the upgrade in an environment with dissimilar ESX host server releases. For example, most of my hosts are ESX 3.02. When I upgrade the first one to ESX 3.5, I want to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I want to know that I’ll be able to sustain a mixed environment with all functionality. When I migrate running virtual machines through host-based VMotion to the ESX 3.5 host, and the reverse, I want to make sure to the best of my ability that nothing will fail. I also want to ensure that all of the VMware DRS and VMware High Availability rules are still enforceable with the mixed-host inventory.

Outlining a functionality matrix and the verification of the behavior is key to having no surprises during a live upgrade. Testing the update to VirtualCenter is a little more difficult but I am setting up a test environment soon to ensure that everything functions as expected in my environment. Overall, the fixes and new features make ESX 3.5 Update 1 an attractive upgrade for systems that are not there already.

VMware’s convenient truth; virtualization lowers greenhouse gas emissions, power costs

VMware, Inc. released a statement today pushing the point that consumers can significantly reduce CO2 emissions and data center power consumption using virtualization. The company reports that consolidating 10 or more physical machines onto a single server can reduce power consumption and costs by 80-90%. VMware customers that have moved from a 1:1 application to server ratio to 60:1 or higher have achieved millions of dollars in capital and operational savings.

Of course, 60:1 is a very high ratio, and most users report a 30:1 or 40:1 application to server ratio. That said, it can be done; a VMware case study on the Ecclesiastical Insurance Group shows the UK based company was able to consolidate 120 servers on two host machines, with two machines for disaster recovery purposes. VMware estimates that for every server virtualized, customers can save about 7,000 kilowatt hours (kWh), or four tons of CO2 emissions, every year. The virtualization giant has virtualized more than 6 million server workloads since 1998, resulting in an estimated energy savings of nearly 39 Billion kWh, or roughly $4.4 billion. This is roughly equivalent to the total energy consumption of Denmark for one year.

VMware reduces power and related costs by increasing server utilization rates and with power management capabilities that can power down servers when not in use. By powering down idle servers and desktops during inactive times, consumers can reduce power consumption by about 25%, according to VMware.

UK-based Sheffield Hallam University, for instance, implemented VMware Infrastructure 3 to reduce power and cooling requirements in the datacenter. Using VMware, they created 170 virtual machines, virtualizing over half of their servers. The virtual infrastructure at Sheffield Hallam runs 170 virtual machines at only 60,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh); this compares to the power required to run 170 physical machines, estimated at 686,000 kWh per year. In all, the company cut 269 tons of CO2 and saved £43,000 ($85,006.62 USD) on their annual power bills.

More information on how other companies have gone green and reduced costs using VMware virtualization is available on VMware’s website.

In addition, VMware works with utility companies including Pacific Gas and Electric and Austin Energy to provide cash incentives based on the amount of energy savings achieved through virtualization - which few data centers have taken advantage of so far.

A showdown for your VDI investment?

Virtualization expert Barb Goldworm has been banging the desktop virtualization and application virtualization drum for a while now. She contends that there is still a lot of innovation to be had in this space and that businesses are poised to reap the benefits, despite pushback from execs. It’s a symbiotic relationship, however, between IT departments and virtualization vendor. In other words, an opportunity for a business to virtualize some aspect of their infrastructure translates to an opportunity for a vendor to sell that virtualization product.

But how do you choose which vendor will fulfill that need? Chances are if you’re on this site, you’re either deeply invested in VMware, or about to become deeply invested, and will probably choose VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for your desktop virtualization needs. For the time being, that’s probably a smart decision for you. It’s also a good thing for VMware, which is positioned to recognize Goldworm’s assessment and to take advantage of the opportunity in the virtual desktop space.

In a recent interview with SearchVMware.com associate editor Hannah Drake, VMware expert and author David Rule agreed. “Virtual desktops is where VMware is going to see a huge surge of revenue. Take a company that has 1,000 servers, that’s 3,000 - 4,000 users. Ten percent of number is a huge amount of net new [virtual desktop] licenses,” he said. Furthermore, Rule believes that investment to be sound because they’re already ahead of the game. In his view, VMware will remain the virtualization technology market leader. “VMware is the innovator in the marketplace. Citrix and Microsoft haven’t brought anything new to the market that VMware hasn’t.”

He’s right, at least in comparison with Microsoft desktop offerings. Virtual PC is more of an emulator than an enterprise virtual infrastructure for distributed computing, and it might take a while to see how Microsoft’s acquisition of Kidaro pans out. In the meantime, VMware is going to have to look out for Citrix’s offering, XenDesktop, according to virtualization guru Chris Wolf. As the major player in the thin-client space, Citrix has the shortest to go in order to compete with VMware VDI and ACE. In fact, Wolf noted during a recent interview with Drake that at last week’s Microsoft Management Summit, when customers asked Microsoft about desktop virtualization, Microsoft reps said that they [don’t] have any current offerings but “strongly recommended Citrix XenDesktop” to their customers.

But Microsoft recommends XenDesktop for good reason. “Citrix has put a lot of work into Xen virtual desktop, and they don’t try to compete with Microsoft. They’ve been working towards interoperability from day one. I can run a VM on Hyper-V, power it down and run the VM on XenServer. I might have to change some device drivers, but I know it’ll run fine for me,” he said, adding that VMware has a lot to learn in terms of backend architecture. “From a scalability perspective, the XenDesktop architecture is a better architecture on the backend. If you look at the VMware line moving forward there will be substantial enhancements for virtual desktops, especially with storage and sharing virtual images.”

But what about price point? It turns out that the lackluster economy may turn out to be the wild card forcing change in the desktop and overall virtualization market. According to Wolf, virtualization price will play a bigger role in determining market leadership than some experts have predicted:

“For your average organization, it’s not just about feature for feature comparison, which VMware is always going to win. It’s about what is good enough, and what can I do with my IT budget, especially in [what is] arguably a recession right now. Price becomes a major consideration in purchasing decision. If I can get by with a product, then that’s going to be a compelling reason to look at that product. For VMware to maintain their market dominance, they have to lower their prices. There’s just no other way around it right now.”

Will VMware drop its prices this year? Only time will tell. We’ll continue to follow the virtualization price war; stay tuned.

Avoid VMware Converter mixed version gotchas

For those of you who have come to use VMware Converter as part of your virtualization migration you probably had at least one conversion that failed for reasons you may not be able to explain. Since the release of VMware Converter 3.02 Update 1 in December of 2007 and in conjunction with the release of VMware ESX 3.5, there have been some practice issues that can address some of the failures that can occur. One issue in particular that plagued me frequently was using Converter 3.01 to perform conversions with an ESX 3.2 as a destination system. The conversions would regularly fail, with the only relevant message in the vmware-converter-x.log file is an entry stating that the image failed with a cryptic “vmodl.fault.InvalidRequest” entry.

Most of these issues are resolved by exclusively using the 3.02 Update 1 version of Converter, however there can be some other issues that prohibit the simple upgrade from correcting the failures. For example, if you had attempted a conversion on a Windows system on a version prior, you may receive the following message about the status of the agent:

In this scenario, you may need to manually remove the agent files. This is one of the two options when installing the agent during the initial steps of the conversion. The other option is to have Converter automatically remove the agent when the import succeeds. If the import fails because of the versioning issue between Converter and ESX, the agent will remain on the Windows client. To remove the Converter agent manually, go to the Windows Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs and select the VMware Converter agent. For some systems using prior versions of Converter, additional steps may be required to remove files if a prior conversion’s remove operation did not complete successfully. This is mentioned in the known issues section of the release notes for Converter version 3.02 Update 1, and similar entries are in the release notes of prior versions as well. The manual removal process of the Converter agent involves removing files and performing a registry modification for the installed service.

VMware Converter is a strong part of the virtualization project aresenal, and keeping sharp on the issues for failed conversions and maintaining product version currency can help address many issues.

VMware expert sounds off on 3i, Hyper-V, XenServer

SearchVMware.com recently spoke with VMware book author and expert David Rule about his latest book, How to cheat at configuring VMware ESX Server. (Check out Design is key to VMware implementation success, expert says for the main interview and a free chapter download.)

The main interview covered security, management tools and best practices for implementation, but there was some other strong material about VMware 3i, Microsoft Hyper-V’s potential affect on VMware adoption and how Citrix plans to gain a better foothold in the marketplace with XenSource, so we decided to include them in this supplementary blog post.

SearchVMware.co: Do you think VMware 3i is VMware’s answer to the problems with the service console (patches, security vulnerabilities, etc.)?

Rule: Yes, and I think 3i is a great product for a variety of reasons. It’s a simpler, lighter footprint on hardware, which in turn gives better reliability and performance.

Do you think Hyper-V will detract from VMware’s customer base?

Rule: I don’t think there’s a compelling enough reason to move from one platform to another. From our internal lab testing, as well as customer feedback, I can say there’s more interest than there used to be in Microsoft, but the main issue is supportability. For at least the next 12-18 months, VMware will remain the market leader. 18 months out we may see more competition. But even looking at the long term, VMware is in a pretty good position because of their current stronghold in the market.

On the other hand, I have seen a few customers here within the last one to two quarters that don’t have any virtualization in place. Microsoft does come up more in conversations with new adopters than it used to.

Given the low licensing cost of Hyper-V, do you think VMware will have to alter its pricing?

Rule: At least with our customers, I don’t see a lot of push back on VMware licensing just because of the amount of consolidation you can get. At a 10:1 consolidation, you’re saving the customer so much it becomes a non-issue. VMware may have to focus on the business approach, and focus on, say, in a 1,000 server data center, here’s how much we can help you save. It’s really going to be about VMware and VMware-partner marketing.

Do you think Citrix XenServer will become a bigger contender?

Rule: A lot of it hinges on Citrix bringing their solutions together. Xen had good momentum behind it in the marketplace. People that didn’t like the VMware licensing, such as smaller size SMBs or those who used virtualization for test and development, liked XenSource. So, Citrix has brand recognition. If Citrix can meld their application and desktop virtualization products together, that’s going to be their strength. And, actually, that’s the direction they want to see things go.

Citrix has two focuses: people that aren’t doing virtualization at all yet, and their core customer base from Presentation Server. They’re taking on more of a grassroots campaign. It would be a tough sell with accounts that don’t currently have a Citrix install base.

How do you think VMware will remain competitive?

Rule: They’re going for continual add-on business, net-new accounts and the licenses they’ll bring in. You’ll see movement with virtual desktops and Site Recovery Manager. But virtual desktops are where VMware is going to see a huge surge of revenue coming in. If you have 1,000 servers, that’s 3,000 - 4,000 users. Just 10% of that is a huge amount of net-new licenses.

Announcing the VI Toolkit for .NET

VMware resource website l o s t c r e a t i o n s has just announced the immediate availability of the VI Toolkit for .NET. From the projects webpage:

The VI Toolkit for .NET is a .NET library that is patterned after the VI Perl Toolkit. It makes connecting to VI, finding a VM, and getting its properties a snap! The toolkit is written in C# 2.0, but can be used by any language capable of loading .NET 2.0 assemblies. One of the reasons that the VI Toolkit for .NET is so powerful is because it is the first .NET application to make use of the recent .NET port of the Apache Commons CLI library for parsing command line options and their arguments. We know it is the first, because we ported CLI! Administrators and developers who like the ability to quickly create scripts with the VI Perl Toolkit but appreciate the depth of .NET will love the VI Toolkit for .NET.