Category: Vmware

Typically, when IT departments decide to use virtualization in the data center, the big question is which workloads to virtualize. The conventional wisdom has been to avoid virtualizing anything that was too I/O-intensive, such as databases and e-mail systems.

However, EMC wants to put that idea to rest. The company, which owns virtualization market leader VMware, spent a lot of time at EMC World 2009 this week driving home the point to IT professionals that the entire data center can be virtualized.

“Virtualization is now ready to run the biggest applications,” said EMC CTO Chuck Hollis (right). “It’s ready for the biggest applications today.”

In fact, Hollis said that virtualization is already running a lot of the biggest applications for many of the world’s largest companies. America’s top auto makers are one example. Driven by intense economic pressures to reduce costs, the auto makers have recently accelerated their adoption of virtualization.

Another industry that is extensively using virtualization is oil and gas, where they have to deliver the same enterprise applications to both desktops and supercomputers. Plus, they also have a wide diversity of sites across the globe that need access to these applications. As a result, they’ve embraced virtualization to get the kind of flexibility they need on the backend.

EMC itself is committed to eventually moving its entire internal server infrastructure to virtualization, but CEO Joe Tucci said in his keynote on Monday that the company isn’t even halfway there yet. That said, Hollis noted that EMC is doing big stuff with virtualization. “We put big, hairy Oracle and Exchange workloads on VMware,” he said.

And, there are some companies that have taken the plunge and gone 100%. Hollis remarked, “We work with outsourcers that are now completely virtualized.”

In some cases, it’s happening very quietly in the background. Hollis told the story of an IT manager who had virtualized over 3,000 servers. Hollis asked him, “How did you get your users to accept this?” The IT manager smiled and replied, “I didn’t tell them.” Apparently, no one noticed.

That’s what EMC believes will happen in nearly all cases, when virtualization is deployed correctly. Meanwhile, virtualization gives IT a lot more flexibility in managing the company’s technology infrastructure.

Hollis said that the new premise of virtualization is “architecting for choice.” He characterized virtualization to a shipping container for server workloads. This was also reflected in Tucci’s slide on virtual infrastructure:

EMC is also trying to make the case that building a virtualization infrastructure inside the firewall will enable companies to create an “internal cloud” now, and better take advantage of the opportunities presented by cloud computing (”external cloud”) in the future. It’s all conceptual and a bit of a stretch, but it’s a fairly compelling idea. Here’s Tucci’s slide on it:

For this concept to really take off, it would likely require standardization and cooperation among the various enterprise vendors, including EMC, Dell, IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Citrix. It would require more than just compatible hypervisors in the virtualization layer.

That kind of collaboration is probably unlikely. EMC is one of the more open collaborators in that group and they show no interest in reaching out. Hollis claimed that VMware currently owns 97% of the virtualization market, so he argues that it is the de facto standard. While there’s some truth to that, it’s difficult to imagine that the virtualization market won’t get a lot more crowded in the years ahead because so many of the companies listed above are putting so much emphasis on it — especially since it can now handle virtually any type of server load out there.

EMC and AT&T are collaborating on a cloud storage offering, they jointly reported on Monday. That’s good news in an environment where there is increasing fear that cloud computing solutions are developing down a fragmented path that will eventually require inter-connectivity. However, both companies acknowledged that there are limits to the collaboration announced.

AT&T’s Enterprise division announced the availability of AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service on Monday at EMC World in Orlando. This on-demand storage product allows businesses to essentially rent storage capacity from AT&T. That storage capacity can then scale up and down as needed, with companies only paying for their usage and not locked into a long-term contract.

Rowan Pacewicz, senior vice president of AT&T Business Solutions, said, “AT&T has always strived to bring the best of breed service to enable its clients to overcome business challenges. And working with EMC, AT&T can provide our customers with a flexible and cost-effective solution for storing, delivering and retrieving data that helps them meet their changing business needs.”

AT&T selected EMC as the technology vendor to build out the service, which will be based on EMC Atmos Cloud Optimized Storage (COS) technology and deployed in AT&T Internet data centers (IDCs). EMC and AT&T are jointly developing and marketing the service.

“With today’s news, EMC is extending the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, minimizing upfront investment, while providing customers with a solution that addresses the complexities and dependencies of enterprise-class cloud environments,” said Mike Feinberg, senior vice president, EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group. “We’ve remained focused on delivering enterprise-ready cloud solutions, and today marks an important milestone that will make the adoption of cloud

Interestingly, the two companies will actually be competing in some cases because EMC will likely be selling Atmos to other providers — competitors to AT&T. But AT&T has 38 global data centers in 12 countries and on four continents, so its offering will be broad and comprehensive.

Meanwhile, EMC will help other vendors develop niche solutions. And EMC is promising to offer “federate” different types of solutions built on its Atmos technology. That could be across vendors or it could also be from an on-premise (internal) Atmos system to an off-premise (external) Atmos system.

That federation could approach could be a step toward unifying different approaches to cloud computing. However, it will not solve all of the challenges.

Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and one of the founders of TCP/IP, recently wrote about his concerns about cloud computing being disjointed:

“In recent years, the term ‘cloud computing’ has emerged to make reference to the idea that from the standpoint of a device, say a laptop, on the Internet, many of the applications appear to be operating somewhere in the network ‘cloud.’ Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others, as well as enterprise operators, are constructing these cloud computing centers. Generally, each cloud knows only about itself and is unaware of the existence of other cloud computing facilities. In some ways, cloud computing is like the networks of the 1960s when my colleagues and I began to think about connecting computers together on networks. Each network was typically proprietary…

Cloud computing is at the same stage. Each cloud is a system unto itself. There is no way to express the idea of exchanging information between distinct computing clouds because there is no way to express the idea of ‘another cloud.’ Nor is there any way to describe the information that is to be exchanged… There are many unanswered questions that can be posed about this new problem. How should one reference another cloud system? What functions can one ask another cloud system to perform? How can one move data from one cloud to another?”

Both EMC and AT&T acknowledged that the federation scheme will not include outside storage providers such as Amazon S3. They commented that in order for that to happen, there would need to be an open standard created and there isn’t a standard that currently exists.

So Atmos is a small step in the right direction but there’s still a lot of collaboration and standards work that will need to be done to keep the cloud from forking.

See also: EMC World kicks off with new cloud offerings and EMC World: A view of the enterprise from above the cloud

This is a guest post from Larry Dignan of TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet. You can follow Larry on his ZDNet blog Between the Lines (or subscribe to the RSS feed).

Citrix on Feb. 23 will detail plans to offer free licenses to its XenServer virtualization application and team with Microsoft to swap support. Citrix and Microsoft will also extend their 20-year partnership into the virtualization market.

In a nutshell, Citrix will work with Microsoft to provide system management, Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Microsoft’s System Center will support XenServer.

Steven Vaughn-Nichols detailed the Citrix plans on his personal blog. Apparently Citrix briefed a bevy of bloggers about its plan under embargo, but the presentation is flying around in various in-boxes. Vaughn-Nichols notes that Citrix won’t open source XenServer, however.

Add it up though and it’s clear that rivals of VMware–Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat–are all cutting deals to gang up on the leading virtualization player. Earlier this week Red Hat and Microsoft teamed up on an interoperability pact.

Vaughn-Nichols also notes another interesting thread:

It’s also expected that at least one of the two major Linux companies, Novell or Red Hat, will announce their support for the new XenServer and Citrix Essentials for XenServer. It is not known, however, which of the companies will be making this jump.

Citrix’s presentation offers further details. I received the presentation in my inbox from two different sources.

This slide highlights Citrix’s big plan–along with Microsoft and Red Hat for that matter. The gist: Blow up the pricing models.

Use Microsoft’s clout to piggy back on mixed source implementations. This goes back to the frenemy argument. Open source virtualization players are more than happy to work with Microsoft to thwart VMware.

And.

Channel Insider has published its list of “Tech vendors that won’t be here in 2010″ based on a survey of the channel partners that make up its audience. There are some surprising names on the list, and some of them are a little far fetched.

In its online slideshow, Channel Insider wrote, “We asked solution providers which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009. The results may shock you. Based on their perceptions and predictions, the following are the vendors that made the going list of those that won’t be here in 2010.”

1. Novell

2. NetApp

3. Check Point

4. McAfee

5. Salesforce.com

6. (tie) Juniper Networks

6. (tie) CA

6. (tie) AMD

7. Sun Microsystems

8. Citrix Systems

9. Symantec

10. VMware

Here are my thoughts:

• I’m surprised Nortel wasn’t on the list
• Novell is definitely in trouble, but who would want to buy them? Same goes for Sun Microsystems. Maybe those two should merge. If either were to be acquired, the price would be cheap and I think IBM might be the only taker.
• AMD’s struggles continue but it isn’t going away.  However, a hook up with VIA might make sesne.
• Having the top two anitvirus makers, Symantec and McAfee, on this list tells us where that market is heading.
• Citrix and VMware are both having problems, but their products have a bright future so they could both be very attractive targets.
• NetApp and Salesforce.com should not be on this list.

VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz (right) used his first VMworld keynote on Tuesday to introduce the company’s Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) to an audience of IT professionals and technology industry insiders at the VMworld 2008 conference at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

With the Virtual Datacenter OS, VMware wants to essentially de-emphasize the traditional OS in the server room (Windows, Linux, and Unix) and use a new software layer — the VDC-OS — to aggregate different types of hardware resources and make the hardware itself invisible to the applications that run on it.

Dan Kusnetzky of ZDNet’s Virtually Speaking summed up the technical details:

“Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) for the internal cloud allows efficient and flexible use of applications and resources. VMware will be evolving their infrastructure to support both existing and future workloads. This requires the creation of a new software platform. VMware is posing a new layer of software that can create an elastic, self-managing, self-healing software platform that will sit between the workloads and the underlying hardware.”

Maritz used this concept to hitch VMware to cloud computing, saying organizations can use this VMware architecture to create their own private cloud for delivering computing and applications. As you can see in the photo below, VMware even advertised the “Cloud” in its booth in the VMworld expo hall.

After the keynote, several attendees were asking each other questions like “Do you understand what the Virtual Datacenter Operating System is?” and “How is it different than what they’re already doing?” Since, you can already see the processors and memory of various servers, separate from the physical hardware, the techies aren’t sure what additional benefits they get .

VMware’s pitch is to replace the current OS architecture with a virtualized OS. This is extremely ambitious, and also highly unlikely. They’d be much better off just focusing making computers, networks, and storage more virtualization-aware. That’s essentially was what the company is doing, but it’s dressing it up as the “Virtual Datacenter OS.”

It’s also unclear how much of this is a real product direction or if it’s just marketing spin. TechRepublic’s virtualization columnist Steven Warren has been running around VMworld berating his connections at VMware to get a look at VDC-OS and get more details and no one has been able to show him anything yet.

All that said, it takes bold moves to change an industry and make history. If this isn’t just marketing spin and vaporware, then VMware does have the potential to shake up the server OS market. I’m just not sure how different VDC-OS is from simply virtualizing the OS and creating management software to tie VM’s together.

And, if it truly does want to create a new software layer that replaces or de-emphasizes the operating system then I doubt VMware can really pull that off — not without changing the underlying application architecture, and VMware can’t do that without a lot of help from a lot of different vendors, including rivals like Microsoft and Citrix.

This week’s TechRepublic poll ask which virtualization software is the
best: VMware, Virtual Server, or Xen. Starting Monday morning, you can
take the poll on the TechRepublic front door and then join the discussion.

In my experience, VMware does the best job of hardware emulation. I’ve
run into the fewest installation problems when installing a variety of
operating systems into VMware virtual machines. However, using the
default settings in VMware, the virtual machines often drag in
performance. This can be enhanced with some tuning.

By contrast, Virtual PC (even before Microsoft bought it) has typically
caused me some installation problems, but once you have a virtual
machine up and running, it tends to perform a little better and is more
usable than VMware’s default performance.

I’ve hasn’t used Xen yet, but I’ve heard some good things about it, especially Virtual Iron.

I’d love to hear the experiences that other IT pros have had with these virtualization products.