This Wednesday May 14th at 12:00 ET I will be co-presenting a live webcast on post deployment virtualization management considerations. CiRBA CTO Andrew Hillier will also be participating in the webcast. Even if you’re tired of my act, I think it would be worthwhile to hear Andrew’s perspective on management. Virtualization solves plenty of problems, but it creates new management challenges as well. In the webcast, Andrew and I will highlight each new challenge and describe practices for effectively managing each. You can register for the webcast here.
Here is the full description of the webcast:
“Now What?” Successful Strategies for Optimizing Virtual Infrastructure After Consolidation
When couples bring their first child home from the hospital, they often find themselves facing “Now What?” syndrome. The baby is home, but what are they supposed to do next? Ultimately, parental instincts kick in and everyone has a laugh about their “Now what?” moment later in life. Unfortunately, virtualization management isn’t as instinctive. Many organizations spend months planning for the arrival of their data center’s newest baby – virtualization, and following completion of the virtualization migration project find themselves in a “Now what?” moment. In this webcast, Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf and CiRBA CTO Andrew Hillier take a deep look at steps organizations should follow after a successful virtualization implementation. Like a newborn baby, virtualization can get into a lot of trouble if the collective virtual infrastructure is not effectively managed and optimized. With the proper approach to virtualization management, you can spot potential performance bottlenecks, governance red flags and continue to optimize utilization despite constant change within the environment.
I’m hoping your answer is at Burton Group’s Catalyst North America conference. If you haven’t been to a Catalyst conference before, I’ll give you a quick intro. Expect to dive deep with 1,500-2,000 other IT professionals in a series of intense 35 minute sessions, with plenty of time for Q&A. I’m chairing this year’s virtualization track, and you’ll have a chance to hear from and grill the top virtualization experts, including: VMware CTO Steve Herrod, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, and virtualization.info analyst and renowned expert Alessandro Perilli. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Catalyst will also mark the first time that the major virtualization vendors will be publicly demonstrating their support for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). At Catalyst, you’ll be able to not just see how vendors are using OVF, but actually have the opportunity to dive deep on OVF with the several vendors that will be showing their support for the latest DMTF open standard for server virtualization.
Additional information on the conference’s content is below. I hope to see you there!
Building the Dynamic Data Center
The dynamic data center leverages virtualization, availability, efficiency and systems management to yield IT services that respond to business needs in real time while reducing costs.
Content-packed Data Center topics:
- Server Virtualization: Beyond Consolidation
- Storage for the Virtual Data Center
- Data Center Efficiency: Energized, Miniaturized, and Highly Available
- Data Center Management Automation
Guest Speakers
In addition to Burton Group Data Center experts, attendees won’t want to miss the high-powered guest speakers:
- Alessandro Perilli, analyst - virtualization.info: Alessandro is a highly regarded expert in server virtualization and security. As owner of the popular site virtualization site: www.virtualization.info, Alessandro has his finger on the pulse of the server virtualization market. At Catalyst, Alessandro will use his unique qualifications to speak on virtualization security. You won’t want to miss his perspective on this increasingly important topic.
- Simon Crosby, CTO - Citrix: A virtualization pioneer, Simon is well known for his significant contributions to the advancement of client and server virtualization technologies. Simon will speak at Catalyst on desktop virtualization and participate on the licensing round table. Come and hear Simon’s vision on these important topics.
- Dr. Steve Herrod, CTO VMware: One of the most respected CTOs in the industry, Dr. Herrod’s industry leadership is the driving force behind VMware’s technology strategy. At Catalyst, Dr. Herrod will speak on Open Virtualization Format (OVF) – an open, industry standard virtual machine meta-data format. Hear him speak on this game-changing technology and attend the OVF event Thursday evening.
- Winston Bumpus, President, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF): A long time customer advocate, Winston has dedicated his career to IT management interoperability. During Catalyst, Winston will be participating in the management round table, sharing his virtualization management vision and providing a standards body perspective. Come hear Winston’s management expert perspective on management interoperability.
Round tables
At Catalyst Conference the Data Center team will host several insightful round tables on important IT industry topics including:
- Server Virtualization Licensing: Data Center Senior Analyst Chris Wolf moderates a licensing round table discussion that includes Microsoft, VMware, Novell, SAP, CiRBA. You’ll want to be present when Chris uses his industry leading virtualization expertise to put these industry titans on the hot seat.
- Storage Connectivity to Server Virtualization: Data Center Senior Analyst Nik Simpson moderates this can’t-miss storage round table that includes experts from EMC, HDS, ONStor, LeftHand Networks, Citrix, VMWare, NetApp. Nik uses his unique storage and server experience to vet potential solutions that can drive server virtualization connectivity to network storage.
- Data Center Management: Data Center Research Director Drue Reeves moderates a management standardization discussion with industry experts from the vendors and standards organization. Come see Drue wade into the management interoperability discussion with Microsoft, Novell, DMTF, and CA.
Interoperability Event:
Open Virtualization Format (OVF): Come see virtualization vendors VMware, Citrix, and Novell demonstrate their support for OVF at the Distributed Management Task Force Hospitality Suite on Thursday night. Be the first to view the new virtual machine format and its provisioning potential.
My recent Virtualization Review magazine article “Hyper-V: Under the Hood” is now online. If you’re looking for a quick assessment of Hyper-V, check it out.
The big news at today’s Microsoft Management Summit was the unveiling of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 beta, which includes the ability to manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure environments. Microsoft can call its VMware management capabilities whatever it wants, but I like to call it Gateway Services for NetWare (GSNW) 2.0. Why?
If you’ve followed Richard Jones’ post Virtualization wars, what can VMware learn from the past, you probably see the analogy. GSNW provided interoperability between Windows and NetWare file serving environments, with an ultimate goal of facilitating NetWare to Windows migrations. Microsoft’s addition of VMware virtual infrastructure support to VMM 2008 is fully analogous to GSNW. Adding VMware management support will get Hyper-V into organizations quicker, while familiarizing organizations with Microsoft’s virtualization management stack. If all goes as planned, Microsoft believes that over time organizations will migrate off of the VMware ESX platform in favor of Hyper-V.
System Center provides management of the entire software stack: application, OS, hypervisor, and hardware. Hyper-V doesn’t have to beat ESX feature-for-feature, as long as the technology is “good enough” and compliments Microsoft’s management stack. Microsoft’s System Center management solution will present a major challenge to VMware. After all, there’s more to the data center than the virtual infrastructure. Management of physical resources, applications, and operating systems is equally as critical, and represents a clear distinction between the Microsoft management solution and that of VMware.
Microsoft’s eventual dominance over NetWare has shown that great technology alone is not always enough. Ease of management and tightly integrated OS and application management is important to many organizations, and the release of the VMM 2008 beta, or GSNW 2.0, is Microsoft’s first shot over VMware’s bow.
Today Microsoft fully unveiled its plans and strategy for taking on VMware. Granted, Hyper-V has yet to ship, but its release is just months away. VMware has time on its side. Virtualization is a core infrastructure technology and it’s not something you just rip and replace. VMware has a very loyal user base that trusts critical workloads to the VMware virtualization stack. That being said, Microsoft has shown its hand to VMware. VMware knows Microsoft’s strategy, and it’s now up to VMware to convince its devoted user base that VMware is the company that should both provide the hypervisor and manage the virtual environment. For VMware, this is not a time for over-confidence. VMware needs to make a compelling case as to why organizations should stick with their solution long term; otherwise, as Richard Jones had predicted, history will once again repeat itself.
Wendy Tanaka at Forbes.com published an article yesterday on future trends in virtualization. The article features perspectives from myself, Forrester Research Vice President Frank Gillett, IDC Vice President John Humphreys, and Gartner Vice President Thomas Bittman.
I found the article to be a very good read, and I’m always interested in hearing what some of my fellow analysts have to say about virtualization. Here’s the link to view the article online - Debating Virtualization.
The first column of my monthly Virtual Advisor columns for Virtualization Review Magazine is now online. In this month’s column, I review current software licensing practices for server virtualization environments and describe trends that may impact licensing down the road. Here’s the link to the column if you’re interested in giving it a quick read - Heroes and Villains.
Today Citrix announced a new licensing model for its XenServer hypervisor. To summarize, XenServer 4.1 is now priced per server, with no restrictions on the number of VMs that run on the server, or the number of CPUs or CPU cores on the server. That’s it. You don’t have to count sockets, processors, or cores - just servers.
At VMworld Europe I was caught off guard by the amount of user angst regarding VMware’s own licensing policies. Organizations were most upset by the fact that they are required to buy licenses in increments of 2 processors, but cannot split a 2 processor license across two physical servers. Organizations were also at odds with the ESX server installed instance-based licensing which required them to purchase duplicate licenses for their DR facility, even if a cold “backup” ESX server was offline. VMware CPU-based pricing and licensing is currently based on CPUs with up to four cores; VMware has noted that it will revisit its licensing policies once eight core CPUs become available.
Citrix didn’t have to listen to VMware’s customers to arrive at their current licensing and pricing policy. Instead, they could have asked anyone “What’s the easiest licensing and pricing policy that we can offer you?” While I’m sure some would inevitably blurt out “free!” most would welcome a simple instance-based pricing model. With it’s announcement, it’s clear that Citrix has listened to its customers and is giving them exactly what they want. Of course, now the pressure is on Citrix’s competitors and I’m eager to see how they will respond.
Citrix’s change in licensing and pricing may involve more than your budget; it can also have significant implications on how you architect XenServer environments. The current pricing model clearly favors scale up, since going with larger servers (such as 4U) that can accommodate more VMs can save you substantial licensing dollars (compared to using double the number of 2U servers). I have always been a proponent of modest consolidation numbers (less than 20:1, with 8:1 to 15:1 being very common) since such as approach shortens high availability failover response and VM restart times following a failure. With cost factoring into the equation, you may find more organizations willing to live with a slightly longer failover response in order to cut XenServer licensing costs in half.
The hypervisor is an inevitable part of the x86 server platform moving forward and one day embedded hypervisors will be nearly as ubiquitous as the system BIOS. With such high volume of long term hypervisor sales, why not give up some potential revenue for the sake of management simplicity? That’s what Citrix is saying. VMware, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Parallels - what do you have to say? It would be easy to state that Citrix is merely leveraging aggressive pricing in order to gain a competitive sales advantage. Following Citrix’s lead would be a tough pill to swallow, certainly in regards to your short term licensing revenue. Long term, following Citrix may accelerate virtualization adoptions, especially in a time of financial uncertainty.
For those of you that attended my Storage Decisions Virtual Seminar: Disaster Recovery Planning webcast today, I wanted to apologize for the slide presentation. The TechTarget folks made some editorial mistakes with the presentation that resulted in the deletion of about a dozen slides. So if what I was saying wasn’t jiving with what you were seeing, that is why. If you would like a full copy of the presentation, just let me know.
Tony Asaro, Virtual Iron’s new Chief Strategy Officer, recently blogged on Virtual Iron’s place in a competitive hypervisor market. Regardless of which hypervisor wagon you’re currently tied to, Tony’s perspective makes for a very good read, and I’m glad to see Virtual Iron embracing the SME market which has been the greatest beneficiary of Virtual Iron’s solution set.
Here’s an excerpt:
Where does Virtual Iron fit into this picture? Right now, we are the little guy in a land of giants. Virtual Iron has a really good product. We have thousands of production implementations (and rapidly growing) and a healthy and increasingly strong channel. However, in spite of this, we are inconsequential to the ecosystem I’ve been talking about. But guess what? It really doesn’t matter.
Where we win – where we matter – is with small and medium enterprises (SME). They have no loyalty to VMware. They are looking for a server virtualization solution that has all of the advanced capabilities and features they need to protect and manage their environments; they want an easy to use solution; and it has to be cost effective so that it doesn’t consume the lion’s share of their IT budget. That is what we bring to the table and it is really a no-brainer for them once they get their hands on it. We also matter to the channel. Many of our channel partners feel that VMware is oversaturated. Since everyone is selling it, they can’t make any money. And their SME customers can’t afford VMware, so they are looking for an alternative. We are that alternative.
You can read Tony’s full post here - A Virtual Monopoly.
Next Thursday, March 27th, a videocast of my October 2007 Data Center Decisions conference session “Disaster Recovery, Storage, and Virtualization” will be available online, followed by a live Q&A session. My webcast starts at 2:30 PM ET, and the Q&A session will follow. There’s also some other very good sessions planned for the live event. I’m planning to listen in on the Bill Peldzus session “Disaster Recovery: Replication, Rolling Disasters and Testing.” Anyway, here’s the registration link if you’re interested - Storage Decisions Virtual Seminar: Disaster Recovery Planning.
