Microsoft can afford to give things away for free as it has deep pockets and offers a great deal of other products and services. If Microsoft was the clear leader in the virtualization space, than it would more than likely be charging customers for Hyper-V and other advanced features. Right now, though, Microsoft is playing catch-up, and giving things away for free is the best way to do that. Because Hyper-V is relatively new it just can’t compete with VMware in areas such as features, performance and product maturity so Microsoft continues to hammer away at the one area that is easy for them to compete at: cost.

So how will VMware respond to this? Most likely, VMware will match Microsoft’s initiative and add VMotion and HA functionality to the free version of ESXi, and possibly one-up Microsoft by also including another management product for free.

VMotion by itself is a useful feature but by no way a critical component to a virtual environment; it simply allows a VM to migrate from one host to another without any downtime, handy? Yes. Necessary? Not so much. VMotion is mostly useful when patching hosts and doing hardware maintenance that requires a host to be shut down or restarted. VMotion, however, is the foundation for many other advanced features like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM), which require VMotion in order to work. Those features have direct benefits as they help ensure a well-balanced environment and also result in cost savings from lower power consumption.

In my opinion, if VMware chooses to follow suite and give HA and VMotion away, it wouldn’t hurt VMware too much. Many customers will still want the additional features like DRS and DPM that rely on VMotion. Further, it’s possible to get HA functionality for free on ESX hosts via a few different methods, so giving HA away for free would be a good move. As we get closer to the release date for Hyper-V R2, expect VMware to fire back at Microsoft in some way to even out the playing field.

Independence Blue Cross (IBC), the largest health insurer in Philadelphia, has grown quickly in recent years, and their  computing demands and costs have grown along with its business. Physical server sprawl and increasing power consumption has plagued the hospital and the cost of acquiring and managing new hardware was growing out of control, VMware reported.

To reverse these issues, IBC turned to virtualization. The company looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but ultimately chose VMware because “it offered a more complete solution and robust tool set, rather than simply a hypervisor,” VMware’s spokesperson said on behalf of the customer. Another plus for VMware was that is offers VMotion to live migrate virtual machines (VM), which Micrsoft’s Hyper-V product won’t offer until the next version, as well as high availability,  resource pooling, manageability and automation, VMware said.

So far, IBC’s Windows application environment is approximately 70% virtualized, including applications like Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, PeopleSoft and Oracle 9i. There are 386 VMs are running on 48 physical hosts, and CPU utilization has increased from 5% to 75%, VMware reported.

Michael Garber, director of distributed infrastructure, at IBC, stated in the release that VI3 paid for itself in less than 16 months and helped IBC avoid more than $1 million in hardware costs.

VMware currently has over 3,000 hospitals on its list of customers, according to VMware.

VMware release lots of customer case studies to show the world how great they are, but when they announce Windows users as customers, Microsoft Hyper-V takes a bullet.  Hyper-V is built right in to Windows Server 2008, so why wouldn’t a Windows user just virtualize with Hyper-V? That’s Microsoft’s argument, and it looks like people aren’t buying it.

There is a ton of speculation on whether Hyper-V will be able to surpass VMware in the virtualization market, but I haven’t seen anything from Microsoft (like Hyper-V customers!) signaling that possibility.

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 “Good performance starts with proper planning and design, configuration best practices and operational awareness,” said Mike Burke (left), Virtual Infrastructure Practice Director for Virtera, a CT-based consulting firm during the first session I attended equivocally titled “Getting the most out of your ESX Environment – Performance tuning.”

“Tuning is not a replacement for proper planning and design,” Burke said. “Don’t guess; gather the data.”

Planning trumps tuning in VMware deployments
Performance, Burke said, hinges on examining and understanding how CPU, memory, networking and disk space will work together in a virtual infrastructure. Planning, then, is the key to better ESX performance, and not necessarily tuning.

Generally speaking, more cores are better; so plan on going big. “How does VMware license their product? Per socket. If you can choose a quad-core, it’s a lot more economical,” Burke said, citing that AMD series processors are now “dirt cheap” compared to earlier years, with eight core boxes going for around $2000.

“You need to weigh what the workload is against what the goals of virtualizing it are,” Burke said. For example, a four-CPU physical server may not be a good candidate for a server consolidation project if it’s currently using the four CPUs to the fullest extent, because you won’t have a good consolidation ratio on those systems. It may, however, be a candidate if the goal is overall server virtualization instead of consolidation.

Another reason for this type virtualization is hardware capability. You can’t VMotion from AMD to Intel. Even in servers from the same line, Burke said, older hardware instruction sets coded in the CPU won’t look the same, preventing VMotion capability.

More host RAM gives better overall performance, configure a VM’s memory based on actual need – are you really using the full two GHz, or would it better used elsewhere? On a general note, though, Burke said “oversubscribing,” or provisioning more memory for virtual machines in the physical host server, is better than not.

Advanced configurations
A systems administrator can, however, tweak a few advanced variables in a virtual machine’s configuration or vmx file. For memory, you can reset the time interval for transparent page sharing (TPS), which is automatically set at 60 seconds, by using mem.ShareScanTime. Adjust the memory pages to scan per 1 GHz idle cycle, automatically set at 4 MB/sec per 1GHz by using mem.ShareScanGhz. mem.CtlMaxPercent limits memory reclamation by ballooning.

But tweaking these parameters, Burke warned, can detract from virtualizing your systems. “You’re instructing ESX to spend more time processing and looking for memory savings rather than sitting in the background and running the VMs, which diverts resources away from virtualizing guests to handling these configurations on the backend.”

On a per-VM level, you can use the same mem.CtlMaxPercent command, and also: sched.mem.maxmemstl, which caps the max memory reclamation by ballooning (vmmemctl); sched.mem.pshare.enable – enables/disables memory sharing (TPS); lastly, using sched.swap.persist can enable vSwap to persist after power-off.

New England VMware Users Group summer meeting attendees sound off
Other sessions spanned from technical sessions about VMware DRS and HA to VDI demonstrations, SRM implementation and general topics, such as managing the virtual data center and how to minimize VM sprawl. Some sessions were led by speakers from consulting companies; others were 45 minute long vendor sales pitches disguised as learning sessions, but overall attendees had a good experience.

“For me, the sessions are good, but I can learn the same material in a textbook or on a website,” said Lee Pullen of the Maine Education Association. “The largest benefit is the networking, meeting other users and finding out what they’re doing in their own environments. That’s the real value in attending.”

“I found a few of the titles of the sessions misleading,” said State of Maine Office of Information Technology employee Lori Blier. “The last session I was at seemed like it was going to be about getting more out of your virtual infrastructure, which is what it was called. But they mainly talked about virtual desktops.”

Perhaps next year, the organizers could include descriptions of the presentations so that participants know exactly what to expect, Blier suggested. She said that she liked the sessions that discussed managing and using ESX Server, which is what the state of Maine plans to upgrade to pending management approval. They currently use VMware Server in production.

“I was a little disappointed that there were no sessions or vendors that focused on the networking side,” commented Kris Kirby from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, who said that’s his main concern with his VMware environment. “I also thought it was going to start a little earlier.”

Chris Harney, a systems engineer from Maine who organizes the New England Users Group meetings, said that feedback from the last session indicated increased interest in virtual desktop information sessions, which is why several of the sessions catered to that track. He also said that if networking came up as a trend on the feedback sheets, it would be voted on by a focus group and most likely included in the program for the January winter meeting, which will be held in Massachusetts.

“We’ve only been doing this for a couple years, and we’re still trying to figure out what works,” Harney said. “This is just a hobby for me, but it’s almost a full-time job. When we first started, we had 35 people. Now we’re looking at almost 500 per meeting.”

Enter the virtual trade show (VTS); an online conference conceived to mitigate the above challenges. Last week, sister sites SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com hosted an advanced enterprise virtualization VTS. I helped staff the networking lounge and editorial booth where I had the opportunity to chat with VMware users about two of the virtualization provider’s newest tools, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Storage VMotion.

IM chatting with attendees
Conversations ranged from general IT talk (“Anyone use virtual desktops?”) to small talk (“What’s the weather like in Maine?”). Trying to be the friendly host, I said “Good morning” to the room. I immediately got the reply “Good evening” and was subsequently told this particular user was signed on from –literally–the other side of the world.

I ended up chiming-in on another user’s question about if anyone was familiar with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The respondent had said that he was, and I ended up asking him about his experience via private IM. SRM orchestrates your virtual machine disaster recovery (DR) plan in the event that your main data center goes down. It prioritizes which virtual machines (VMs) are brought up at the failover site based on available resources, syncs your VM configurations between the main site and the failover site, and allows for DR plan testing without having to take the system offline. It’s a relatively new addition to the VI3 lineup, having been on the market for four months (at the time of publication).

Our conversation turned to plug-ins, and he raved about Andrew Kutz’s Storage VMotion plug-in. The plug-in adds a user interface to the out-of-the-box product, which operates through a command line interface. The attendee explained that he’s primarily a “Windows guy,” so a graphical user interface makes using Storage VMotion much easier.

Kutz recently released an update to the Storage VMotion plug-in.

“The new release now ignores raw device mapping,” Kutz said. “Previously, if you had a raw device that pointed to a 300 Gig disk, the plug-in would look at it as an actual disk and screw up the disk size map.”

He also removed the majority VMware’s internal code from the plug-in (excepting the code that loads the plug-in), replacing it with code based on the VI Toolkit for .NET.

Impressive user interface
The VTS emulates the look of a physical tradeshow floor, which makes navigation a bit friendly, though not as intuitive as I would have liked. You could either move around with the help of a clickable navigation bar, or point-and-click your way from the main entryway to the desired location, be it the conference hall, vendor hall, networking lounge or “library” where you can download PDFs of presentations and various information from vendors, which then moves into your “suitcase,” displayed on your personal page.

VTSs are essentially fancy webcast packages displayed in unconventional ways. In this particular show, the topics were “Protecting your Virtual Environment: Backup and Storage,” “Virtual Infrastructure Automation and High Availability Best Practices” and “Virtual Infrastructure Tuning and Advanced Management.” The speaker was displayed on the left side of the screen presenting his slides via streaming video. The slides were displayed on the right hand side. Users could ask questions via a box at the bottom of the screen.

The VTS, if done correctly, has many more plusses than minuses. As long as there is a reliable Internet connection, there’s no need to leave the data center (if you don’t have a reliable connection in your data center, you might think about leaving for good). The content is almost exactly the same as at a physical trade show (that’s how they got the video of the speaker to begin with). And editorial staff can send IT pros direct links to helpful guides that they know of if an IT pro wants to know about, for example, virtual desktop drawbacks.

If any SearchVMware.com readers passed up the opportunity to “attend” a virtual trade show, I suggest you test it out next time a topic of interest comes around. It’s actually fun to use (think AOL in the 90’s minus the “you’ve got mail”) and offers great learning potential and networking opportunities.

An archived version of the advanced enterprise virtualization virtual trade show is available online, short registration required.