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I’ve been noticing that “virtualization” conversations are starting to shift into an IT management and data center automation direction. The market has been doing a good job at educating us on the benefits of server virtualization such as server consolidation, improved resource utilization and new ways to look at business continuance and disaster recovery, but because of the encapsulation of the workloads and the mobile nature of virtual machines, there exists a new opportunity to achieve newfound IT efficiencies.
The goal of IT is to become a transparent entity that can dynamically predict and rapidly adopt to change while delivering consistent application access and performance to the end-user. While the benefits of virtualization in the automated data center are an attractive target, many firms deploying virtualization solutions struggle with virtual machine management from creation to retirement, scripting processes in an effort to pick up were the vendors have left off and smoothly transitioning test and development environments into production.
In an effort to address these challenges, VMware announced today the GA of its management and automation solutions. These solutions are a great opportunity for VMware to further differentiate itself from the competition and prove that they are committed to its customers by developing and innovating new products that complement and build upon its well proven infrastructure set of solutions and tools.
Site Recovery Manager, Lifecycle manager, Stage Manager and Lab Manager have all been announced by VMware, but now the products are ready for purchase! We can expect to continue to see improvements to the core infrastructure solutions, but management and automation are taking the main stage as more and more data centers look at virtualization as a technology that improves IT operations and delivers an improved service to the core business.
After a little 3-day hiatus of flying a single engine airplane across the country from San Diego, CA to Massachusetts, I am back in action. Spending 3 days in a little single engine plane using nothing but ground references to pick my way across the United States is a trip I will never forget and could spend hours telling you stories about.
Now back to virtualization. Last week I spent two days at Microsoft Management Summit and another two days at Interop in lovely Las Vegas. Here are some highlights.
- Instead of battle testing Hyper-V directly against VMware ESX, Microsoft is going after the market from a management angle. VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) can manage both Hyper-V and ESX and I have to believe that they will soon be able to manage Citrix XenServer. In other words…..forget about the hypervisor, it is the management tools that really matter.
- Microsoft made a big deal about being able to live migrate virtual machines without causing any application downtime – a feature that they do not have today. Currently VMware has VMotion, which enables this exact feature, and the current beta versions of Hyper-V and VMM have what they call Quick Migration, which does cause some downtime, but it can be measured in seconds, not minutes. Quick Migration is much better than the current situation most users have in their physical server world. So, in any case, Microsoft made it a point to say that they will have Live Migration, but I really don’t think it is going to necessarily stop anyone from implementing Hyper-V.
- Recent ESG research and Microsoft's aggresive go to market strategy do in fact suggest that Microsoft has the potential to exceed ESX production workload deployments in the next 12-18 months if performance is equal or better, a security vulnerability is not discovered and Microsoft can accelerate its product's RTM (release to manufacturing) into the late summer.
- I also sat down with Robb Mapp, an analyst relations manager at Microsoft, for a quick interview. If you are interested to hear what I had to say, you can check out the video here.
Some industry experts were baffled to see Citrix dish out 500M for XenSource and they kept comparing XenSource’s technology to VMware ESX Server. However, what they missed is the combined ability of Citrix and XenSource to build and deliver a product for the desktop which is now branded Citrix XenDesktop. While the server virtualization market is still red hot, the opportunity for desktop virtualization should not be ignored.
Citrix XenDesktop public beta has been available since October 2007 and today Citrix announced that XenDesktop will become generally available at its Citrix Synergy 2008 event in May. Citrix will be co-marketing its virtual desktop solutions with Microsoft. Citrix is well known for working closely with Microsoft to deliver Microsoft Office applications using Citrix XenApp and now they will join forces to deliver XenDesktop, Windows Server 2008, Vista and System Center.
Citrix differentiates themselves from the other VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) players by having the capability to deliver a single desktop image to many end-users and also by delivering the desktop image independent of the applications. XenDesktop delivers the desktop image and Citrix XenApp delivers the applications independently from one another.
I have found that current server virtualization adopters are more likely to evaluate and deploy desktop virtualization. The reason I mention this is that the jump from server virtualization to desktop virtualization is happening, but it is typically managed by completely different teams within IT. The jump into desktop virtualization from application virtualization is not as big of a leap and it is often managed by the same team and this is where Citrix has had success in the data center.
Hold on to your hat, the desktop virtualization market is heating up and all the major vendors are gearing up. In the last 12 months the following acquisitions have already taken place showing us that they are rigging their gear and dropping their lines in the water ready to reel in the next trophy catch.
April 2007, VMware acquires Propero August 2007, Citrix acquires XenSource September 2007, VMware acquires Dunes January 2008, VMware acquires Thinstall and Foedus February 2008, Sun acquires innotek March 2008, Microsoft acquires Kidaro April 2008, Symantec acquires AppStream
….and there are a pile of startups: Pano Logic, NComputing, MokaFive, Stoneware…..
What’s all the hype?
The efficiencies and benefits of server virtualization are impacting hundreds and even thousands of servers in some cases, but the potential impact of desktop virtualization is in the tens of thousands. It is true that server virtualization is still in its infancy and I see desktop virtualization primarily being deployed in highly regulated environments for its security advantages. However, with Web 2.0, SOA and SaaS becoming popular architectures, the desktop environment as we know it today will be undergoing considerable changes in the coming years. The fun part is seeing who the winners will be in this fishing tournament!
Last week I spent a few days in the Netherlands speaking at NetApp Innovations 2008 in Rotterdam. The well run event attracted over 400 customers and about 200 plus partners. The focus of the event was to give users a well documented blue print of how virtualization is or will be impacting their environment and how NetApp solutions help enable the benefits of virtualization.
I love going to Europe! It has so much more culture than we have in the US and I always look forward to learning more each time I take a trip. The first question I get whenever I travel to Europe is always without exception related to politics….and now for sport they like to make fun of the weak dollar…..thanks ;-) It makes me realize how uneducated we are as Americans about our political system. The Europeans know more than we do!?!?
Together with Lauren Whitehouse, an Analyst here at ESG, I recently recorded a podcast describing some of the unique benefits of NetApp as they relate to data protection and backup in a virtualized environment. It’s pretty short and worth a listen if you are interested to see how NetApp is differentiating themselves.
ESG_Podcast_NetApp_and_VMware.mp3
The Telco industry is beginning to implement desktop virtualization internally for departmental deployments and call centers, but their eyes are set on a much larger opportunity. First, they plan to use internal desktop virtualization to understand the technology and discover how it can work in a corporate environment and then will look for ways to offer desktops and applications as a service to their customer base. In a recent ESG survey, 51% of the Telco and Media companies said that they were currently evaluating desktop virtualization solution.
My in-laws will never buy a computer and probably never send an e-mail. This is primarily due to the complexity of the PC and the fact that I don’t want to become their personal IT support technician. While it would be nice to share pictures of the grandchildren with them, it’s not worth the hassle and learning curve they would have to go through.
However if the local cable provider offered a service (such as desktop virtualization, although they would never call it that, nor should they) that masked the desktop operating system and delivered applications on demand to the home, giving users a menu of services that met their requirements, my in-laws could “purchase” an e-mail application and maybe even a web browsing application so they could keep in touch with the old country (they are from Italy). The complexity of the PC user experience would be masked by the benefits of desktop virtualization and they would be able to always see the new pictures of the grandchildren.
This is a simple example, but you can see where the opportunity lies. Think about the opportunity in the education industry and the play it can have in small companies that make up the majority of businesses in the world. Desktop virtualization is absolutely introducing new ways of computing.
In order for all this to make sense, it has to be economically viable. It seems that everyone I know complains about their telephone and cable bills. When these new services are offered, the benefits have to be clear and the cost affordable for the masses.
Microsoft is doing everything they can do accelerate the RTM of Hyper-V. On March 19, 2008, they said that they reached a major milestone in the development process and announced the release candidate of Hyper-V. At this point, the code is baked and they will work on bug fixes and continue the QA process until they announce the RTM later this year….or will it be sooner rather than later? I think so!
In a research ESG survey, we asked current users what their primary server virtualization solution was. Of the current users, 70% chose VMware (no surprise) and 23% chose Microsoft. You have to remember that 23% said they are running Microsoft’s current solution, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. MS Virtual Server is a hosted solution which means it requires a full blown operating system to be installed and then the virtualization platform is layered on top of the OS. From this point, virtual machines are then created. Not such a hot architecture, but it works and eliminates the need to purchase additional physical servers in many cases which is a big win for any IT organization.
While the user community is excited to see Hyper-V on the near horizon, Microsoft still needs to prove that the product works, scales, delivers the required performance and, most importantly, is an extremely stable platform. Microsoft has a mixed past when it comes to 1.0 products. Remember SMS 1.0 and DPM 1.0….not so hot, but the 2.0 versions had major improvements. With the server virtualization market as hot as it is today, Microsoft can’t afford to slip on its timeline nor can they risk delivering an inferior product to the market.
As if improved availability, increased hardware utilization, physical server consolidation, efficient server provisioning and enabling disaster recovery weren’t reasons enough to deploy server virtualization, VMware just announced VMsafe, making operating in a virtual environment more secure. VMsafe is basically a set of APIs that enables security vendors to “hook into” the memory, CPU, disk and I/O systems of a virtual machine and monitor any and all the operations performed on an individual virtual machine basis. Essentially this creates transparent visibility into the virtual environment that was impossible to achieve before VMware opened up the doors. Think of this as a brand new security layer in a defense-in-depth security architecture. The improved visibility provides a tremendous opportunity for security vendors to develop new tools and products that fully leverage this new opportunity.
There is plenty of buzz amongst the community here at VMworld Europe 2008. I commend VMware for opening the “back door” and working with all the security vendors. The biggest opportunity for VMware around VMsafe is the indirect increase in adoption in VMware software solutions. I imagine businesses will soon begin to implement business workloads and mission critical applications on virtual machines solely to achieve better security than they could achieve on a physical server. In theory, other server virtualization vendors should be able to provide the same type of visibility. Microsoft? Citrix? Expect similar announcements sooner rather than later.
I’m in Cannes, France all this week attending VMworld Europe 2008. This is VMware’s premier event in Europe and although the number of attendees is less than it is in the US, the show is buzzing with virtualization speak from the 4500 attendees and nearly 100 exhibitors.
Diane Green just finished her keynote that included a general overview of server virtualization and how it has grown from consolidating physical server resources to a data center that is fully automated with virtualization being the key infrastructure enabler.
IBM, HP and Dell all took their turns up on the big stage explaining to the audience why their solutions are better than the others. IBM demonstrated the capability of running 16,000 Microsoft Exchange users on a single physical server using VMware. HP demoed how VMware Virtual Center and HP Insight Manager will work together to provide insight into hardware failure and communicate to Virtual Center to start moving virtual machines around until the hardware failure has been remedied. Dell announced that all of its VMware compatible servers will ship with VMware software. Each of them showboated about its long term relationship with VMware, and Dell claimed to sell more licensed copies of VMware than the others.
If you are wondering which steps VMware is going to take next it is clearly around data center automation, which is interesting considering Novell’s announcement to acquire PlateSpin. VMware is also clearly focused on the desktop. Diane ran a few desktop demos that showed the versatility of desktop virtualization by efficiently applying a single patch to multiple virtual desktop images, showing the audience how technology is coming to check out a virtual desktop image and take it on the road with you and finally she demoed the quick application access and installation leveraging technology from its recent Thinstall acquisition. All of which is a great set up for my break out session on Thursday, Desktop Virtualization: The Next Big Thing?.....Thank you Diane!
As an analyst I often get asked the question from vendors and end-users, "What should we be looking out for? What's the next big technology boom?” There is no doubt we are in the middle of such a boom right now with the “virtualization” of our data centers, but for fun let’s assume for a minute that commodities rule the data center, including servers, hypervisor, networks, and storage components. Ultimately, what are left are the applications that are used to run the business. This is really where we should be focusing the majority of our efforts to run a successful business. It isn’t the company with the fastest CPUs and biggest memory pools that is going to win, it is the company that has been able to accelerate application development by delivering applications to end-users and customers that scale to exceed business demand and ultimately generate revenue.
I think the focus on applications, and in particular, Web 2.0 applications, is going to quickly make its way to the front page. On the drive into work this morning I heard that Microsoft is opening a brand new, first of its kind lab on the east coast in Cambridge, MA that will focus on both computer science and social sciences. The shift is taking place to focus less on the technology and to bring in social scientists to analyze the social behavior of people and how they interact with one another. If we think the online world plays a big role in our lives today, Microsoft is apparently determined to figure out how to draw us deeper into social networking and online communities as a routine part of our daily personal and business lives.
I’m all in favor of their efforts. I’ve experienced how the online world has simplified day to day activities and in many cases it has actually been able to buy me back a piece of time – a very difficult task in today’s fast-paced society. I’m sure Microsoft will do a fine job drawing upon some of the smartest people in the Boston area as they research ways to enhance our online experience. It’s important that we spend some time today focusing on the infrastructure that will be needed to support these new applications so that when they do come to full fruition we can focus our time and effort on the applications and the end-user experienc rather than on the underlying infrastructure. Now all Microsoft needs to do is figure out how to get our 2 month old baby boy to sleep through the night :-)
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