Xen

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.

Fortune 500 company uses VMware to slash long term power costs

Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American Corp., a Fortune 500 company that provides business information and analytics, is standardizing its data center with virtualization software from VMware, Inc. to improve power efficiency and better server utilization rates.

First American’s Enterprise Architect, Jake Seitz, said the increasing cost of power was the most significant driver for virtualization.

“In Q407 we started looking at our utility costs and our data center footprint, and realized that embracing virtualization would help us maximize what we have and shrink our utility footprint,” Seitz said. “My hope is that we can get to 80% virtualzed environment – we are at about 30% right now.”

Low hardware utilization rates also prompted the company to invest in VMware virtualization. “We wanted to better utilize our existing hardware. We had some hardware utilization as low as 4%, and rarely would be see anything above 15% utilization,” Seitz said.

When Seitz began looking at virualization about two years ago, he also deployed small Microsoft Virtual Server and Citrix XenServer environments - both less expensive than VMware - but decided to standardize on VMware going forward because he liked the management tools and support.

When the project started, the data center at First American was equipped with 2,800 physical servers running that many OSes. After virtualizing 700 of those servers, First American runs 3,500 OSes, Seitz said.

The OSes are mostly Microsoft Windows, though there are some Unix systems on mainframes and in Xen containers, he said. The physical servers supporting the virtual machines are x86 servers rom Hewlett Packard and Dell, and many are equipped with Intel Xeon quad-core processors, Seitz said.

First American hasn’t gotten rid of many physical servers because they lease them, but it will save power in the long run because with better server utilization, they won’t have to add more physical servers in the future, Seitz said.

Also, because their hardware is leased, it is refreshed every three years. When this happens, the IT staff has to port all of the applications and OSes from the old hardware to the new hardware. Normally, this takes months to accomplish, but it should be a lot easier using virtualization, Seitz said.

“Now, instead of doing a one-to-one refresh, we will virtualize our environment and it will shave off a few months in man hours,” Seitz said.

The company is starting to virtualize their mission critical applications now, and have even adopted a “virtual machine first” policy.

“You need a really good reason to get a physical server,” Sietz said. “Everything we do now is virtual.”

Is the mixed virtualization vendor data center possible?

I recently floated the idea of implementing a mix of virtualization products in your data center as a way to better customize your virtual environments. The query was part of a larger discussion I wanted to get going about how VMware will compete when Hyper-V is generally released. I threw out the notion that data center managers might use, for example, Hyper-V for end-user file servers; VMware ESX for apps that require dynamic load balancing, sophisticated disaster recovery and migration; and Xen for commodity Linux boxes.

The idea behind that supposition was to match your enterprise investments to appropriate workloads because, let’s face it, running everything on ESX is going to be expensive compared to other options. Big deal if you don’t get ESX-level features because you may get enterprise level features on silver-medal products.

Now, I wish I could take credit for that idea (for better or for worse), but that really came from SearchServerVirtualization.com’s editor, Jan Stafford. At any rate, a few people had comments about that note and I thought it would be fitting to continue that conversation with their input:

Hi,

One of the reasons I think Hyper-V is interesting is the server core concept. The ability to create appliance virtual machines for specific roles such as DNS, DHCP, DC etc. means you can drastically reduce the manageability overhead and the attack surface for those servers. Weird - I’m finding myself suggesting that an all-MS platform may actually be more secure than the alternatives!

On the other hand, you may be correct that fully-fledged servers with complex HA needs will be better off on ESX.

Cheers,
Dan Flower

There are flaws to this query, the base of which stem from whether ESX, Hyper-V and Xen-based virtualization products can even be compared; never mind that there are disparities between Xen-based virtualization vendors (xVM isn’t Red Hat isn’t Citrix Xen etc). This was the point that some folks took issue with:

Just a comment about an “apples and oranges” comparison you made:

I understand the point you were trying to make about using the right virtualization product for the right job, and at times this might mean using multiple solutions, but you can’t really compare Hyper-V or VMware to Xen. Both Virtual Iron and Citrix offer a virtualization solution based on Xen technology, but neither sells just Xen. Your reference to Xen brings to mind what a Suse or Red Hat shop might do with Xen technology, but not those that would consider Hyper-V or VMware as a virtualization solution.

David Roden

So, there are still many problems that have to be approached before we even ask the question of implementing a mixed enterprise virtualization infrastructure. Ultimately, people will have to decide on what functionality, support and management interfaces are important. Is quick migration support good enough, or do you need live migration? How does each platform approach P2V conversions? Does VirtualCenter have the right kind of management options for your installation? Will you be better off using System Center Virtual Machine Manager?

Let’s keep prodding at this idea and brainstorm ways that using multiple virtualization products in one environment could work. Send us your comments and feedback. If you’ve tried the mixed virtualization environment, we’d love to hear about it.