Calling All VMware Employees

Thanks!

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/09/2008 at 12:48 PM5 comments

Major Microsoft Virtualization News Coming in September

He said that on Sept. 8, Microsoft will be unveiling its end-to-end virtualization solutions. He didn't go into detail, but it's not hard to guess that he meant, at the least, the commercial release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008). I'm not sure what other products could be launched, since Hyper-V is out, App-V (Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5) will likely be out before then (it was at the Release Candidate stage in mid-June), and there's still not much news about Kidaro, the PC virtualization technology that will have some role in Microsoft's virtual desktop infrastructure offering.

My best guess (no promises on how good that "best" is) is that VMM 2008 will be the centerpiece announcement, with the other released products filling out the "end-to-end" solution. So mark Sept. 8 on your calendar; I know I am. I'll find out more, of course, and let you know about it, ASAP.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/09/2008 at 12:48 PM4 comments

Diane Greene Out as VMware Chief

Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who left that company in 2000, takes over Greene's role as captain of the ship, becoming the new president and CEO. Maritz founded another company, Pi Corporation, focused on cloud-based computing, that was bought by VMware's parent company, EMC, last February. Talk about a quick promotion.

This is stunning, totally out-of-the-blue news. I have no idea why this happened; there were no hints that I saw anywhere that Greene was in trouble. After all, VMware continues to perform very strongly in the market. Sure, there were some choppy waves; for example, Microsoft's Hyper-V was just released and threatens VMware's pricing structure, among other challenges. But given VMware's position as the dominant force in this space, the company is poised to answer those kinds of challenges.

Often, when a top-level executive is in trouble, there are warning signs that build up over months or even years: the company is under-performing, there's chaos in upper management with executives abandoning ship right and left, whispers of takeovers float around the company. Nothing of that nature was happening, as far as I'm aware, with VMware. The company's direction is clear, and it continues to unveil new products and move forward.

It's hard to imagine a more brief recognition of the gigantic role Greene played in shepherding VMware through its growing years into the virtualization Goliath it is today. From the press release:

"As one of the founders and the leader of VMware, Diane guided the creation and development of a company that is changing the way that people think about computing. The Board thanks her for her considerable contributions to VMware and wishes her every success in the future," stated Joe Tucci, Chairman of VMware's Board of Directors.

That's it. That's it? For Diane Greene? It makes one wonder what's going on at EMC. Since a successor was already named, this was obviously in the works for quite awhile. After that brief mention, the rest of the release is about how qualified Maritz is. Then, at the end of the release is an ominous note about how VMware expects profits for 2008 to fall below the 50 percent growth rate of 2007's performance.

Is that what this is all about? VMware isn't performing as spectacularly as it had in the previous year? If so, that would be a remarkably short-sighted reason to can Greene.

It should be a very interesting earnings call on July 22, when Maritz will talk with journalists and analysts for the first time as president of VMware. I wouldn't be surprised if he announces price cuts across the board for VMware products, as that is the chief complaint about VMware.

In any event, Diane Greene is out. Paul Maritz is in. Where does VMware go from here? In all, it's another seismic shift of the virtualization landscape.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/08/2008 at 12:48 PM6 comments

About VMware's New President

She believes Maritz was picked to replace Greene specifically because of his Microsoft background. "He really knows Microsoft, and Microsoft is coming hard at VMware in the virtualization space," Foley says. "Who better than somebody who knows how Microsoft thinks?"

Foley, of course, is referring to the recent release of Hyper-V, Microsoft's first enterprise-worthy hypervisor, and the coming release later this year of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Microsoft is giving away Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008, a move squarely aimed at the premium price of VMware's offering, ESX (the standalone version coming later this year, Hyper-V Server, will sell for the nearly-free price of $28). In addition, VMM 2008 can manage not only physical machines in addition to virtual ones (something VMware can't do), it can even manage ESX. Yeah, you could say Microsoft has both barrels aimed at VMware.

Here's a bit about Martiz's years with Microsoft, from the VMware press release announcing the change:

"Paul Maritz retired from Microsoft in 2000, after 14 years there. During this period Paul managed the development and marketing of many of the company's major products, including such major releases as Windows 95, Windows NT, Database, Tools and Applications."

That's why replacing Greene with Maritz makes so much sense (although the wisdom of replacing Greene at all is certainly open for debate). When VMware first bought Maritz's last company, Pi Corporation, last February, Foley thought that it was a move to go head-to-head more with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who's pushing Microsoft's cloud computing strategy (Pi competed in the same cloud arena). Now, Foley says, "It looks like a Maritz v. Muglia faceoff," referencing Bob Muglia, Microsoft's Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business (STB). As part of his duties, Muglia sets and manages Microsoft's virtualization strategy. "Muglia thinks more like Microsoft" than Ozzie does, Foley says, meaning that Maritz may have a more clear read on where Microsoft may be going with virtualization.

Maritz's main claim to fame for non-Microsoft watchers is as the executive who allegedly made the claim that Microsoft wanted to "cut off Netscape's air supply" during the browser wars. The statement, which Maritz denies making, was the most famous line to come out of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust trial in the late 1990s.

Such a statement hints at an an aggressive, no-holds-barred executive, but that image is belied by Maritz's general demeanor, according to Foley. "He's very serious and soft-spoken," she says. "He's got a great pedigree, and is respected in the industry," including by those who worked for him, Foley explains.

Does that translate into him being an effective leader of VMware, though? On that question, Foley is less clear. "He seemed like more of a technologist than a salesman. Is that what you want for a CEO?" she wonders.

Getting back to Greene, it's "sad," Foley comments, to see one of the few female CEOs of a major software company get the boot. "But I don't think she was let go because she was a woman," Foley adds.

If Greene had to go, in parent company EMC's view, Foley thinks it chose a solid replacement. "I think it's a pretty good choice ... I think they're in good hands with Maritz."

Note that at the time of this writing, VMware had not responded to our requests for comment on the replacement of Greene.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/08/2008 at 12:48 PM1 comments

Microsoft Adds Hyper-V to Planning Tool

That means most IT departments still aren't using virtualization; and among those that are, many have gone with a "consolidate a few servers and see what happens" method, without any real strategy behind it.

Thus, it makes sense to show you how to plan for a virtualization rollout -- what you need to know before you step into the brave new world. And one of the key components of that is knowing what's on your network, followed by that network's readiness for virtualization. To that end, there are a number of planning tools (which we'll also be reviewing in a great product shootout) to help in that step.

One of those tools is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.1, which just released to manufacturing and is available for download now. The big news is that it supports Hyper-V. MAP, which is free, is an agentless product. TechNet has a nice learning center on MAP here.

Notice that MAP is free. Once again, Microsoft is attempting to undercut industry leader VMware with a free product. VMware's Capacity Planner is variable in price, and available only through a VMware partner. But, being VMware, you can be pretty sure it ain't cheap. Of course, the argument can be made that you get what you pay for, so each business will need to determine if it's worth the price. Still, Microsoft is being extremely aggressive on pricing in the virtualization space -- more aggressive, I'd be willing to bet, than it is in any other single area. That's what you get when you're the upstart.

In any event, being free, you've got nothing to lose by downloading it and kicking the tires. And don't forget to check out our Ultimate Planning issue -- coming to a mailbox or Website (this one!) to you soon.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/2008 at 12:48 PM6 comments

VMware Closes B-hive Deal

B-hive's primary product, Conductor, extends the ability of VMware's management console, VirtualCenter (VC), to see inside applications that reside in Virtual Machines (VMs). This is a weakness of VC, which can tell you what's happening with the VMs themselves, but has little ability to look inside them.

As Executive Editor Tom Valovic blogged awhile ago, the kind of analysis B-hive provides is growing increasingly crucial as companies virtualize more and more mission-critical apps. For those apps, it's important to understand the impact on the end user, and that's where B-hive shines. After all, you're not going to virtualize a database for a Web app if it slows down your site and keeps customers from ordering.

B-hive was founded in 2005, and has R&D facilities in Israel, which VMware will continue to use. Terms of the deal were not disclosed at any time during the process, but Internet speculation put the figure in the tens of millions of dollars.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/2008 at 12:48 PM5 comments

A Laughable 'Benchmark'

First, a few announcements: everyone (in the U.S., that is), have a greath 4th of July! Eat hamburgers and watermelon until you get sick, then work it off playing hours of volleyball.

Second, I'll be out for the balance of the next week. I'll be in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, doing some video work for my buddies over at sister publication Redmond Channel Partner magazine. While I'm there, however, I'm going to try my best to grab some Microsoft execs who work in the virtualization arena, and talk to them about Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Kidaro, App-V and more. I should get some good blog material out of that. The downside is that I won't be blogging here for most of next week, although I'll try to get some stuff in toward the end of the week.

OK, announcements out of the way. I found an interesting tidbit from our "Virtual Advisor" columnist Chris Wolf. Chris saw an announcement from QLogic and Microsoft about an amazing performance benchmark. The press release claimed that a QLogic SAN and Hyper-V together "achieved industry leading performance results that demonstrate near-native transaction performance for a virtualized computing environment."

Hmm. Sounds impressive. But the intrepid Mr. Wolf's skepticism antannae went up, and he started digging into the data itself. What he found, he said, made him feel duped:

"If I was watching an Olympic event, this would be the moment where after thinking I witnessed an incredible athletic event, I learned that the athlete tested positive for steroids."

It turns out QLogic and Microsoft had stacked the deck to a nearly hilarious degree to get the results. First, it used a Texas Memory RamSan 325 FC storage array, which is a solid state device. It also used a block size of 512 bytes, which you don't see in the real world. Chris nails this fantasy benchmark setup to the wall:

"No other virtualization vendors have published benchmarks using solid state storage, so the QLogic/Hyper-V benchmark, to me, really hasn't proven anything. Furthermore, the published benchmark fails to reveal latency numbers, which has been the most useful value of storage performance in virtualized environments. Applications can be very sensitive to I/O latency, and it's import to disclose latency numbers in any storage benchmark ... To me, these exercises in smoke and mirrors trickery (i.e. solid state storage in a hypervisor storage performance "benchmark") yield more questions than answers."

Go get 'em, Chris. Microsoft and QLogic, you need to bring it stronger to the hole than that (to use current basketball terminology) or risk more "in your face" rejections in the future. You can start by being more transparent about your methodology. A cynic might claim that you purposely left out information that would show your "benchmark" to be the farce that it is.

The lesson: beware benchmarks that aren't up front about methodology -- especially when they come from a company that's just released a brand-new product (like, uh, Hyper-V for example) and needs to push it.

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/03/2008 at 12:48 PM7 comments

Will Hyper-V Doom XenServer?

Brian, as I mentioned in a blog entry about his post, believes that Xen (note: not XenServer, which is a paid variant with Xen at its core, but the free, open source Xen hypervisor) could die off, and that the RTM of Microsoft's Hyper-V is the possible death knell.

Simon was the head of XenSource before it was bought by Citrix, and thus has a personal stake in this, as he's put his heart and soul into Xen for years. He thinks Brian is full of hot air in this case.

First, he says that XenServer (Citrix's Xen-based commercial hypervisor), while small, is on a growth curve:

"We have somewhere approaching 4,000 enterprise customers, and about 3000 trained channel partners ... The XenServer market share is small, and growing as rapidly as any such product can given the current VMware brand status, and the fact that we started well behind them."

He adds, correctly, that XenServer is still new in the market, so it makes sense that its share is small.

Simon then goes on to make a very interesting argument: that Microsoft and Citrix are ultimately partners, not competitors, even in the virtualization space. At least on the hypervisor side. Here's the core of his thesis:

"It is important to state yet again that we are not in a competition for server sockets with Microsoft. If that were the case, why would we have helped Microsoft to make Hyper-V a better hypervisor, by developing the shims and drivers that will allow Linux to run with optimal performance on Hyper-V? The founding thesis of XenSource, and the continued strategy at Citrix, is to promote fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisor based virtualization. If the hypervisor is free, why worry about who delivers it? Let the customer pick the implementation method that they want - the real money is in the up-sell with products that make virtualization valuable for customers."

It sounds like Simon is limiting his "cooperation, not competition" argument to the hypervisor alone, i.e. XenServer vs. Hyper-V. It's the "up-sell" products, as he calls them, where the fight will play out. He specifically mentions XenApp, the former Presentation Server, and XenDesktop, the virtual desktop infrastructure product, as Citrix' two main entries, along with hints of more products to come.

I think, however, that the hypervisor will play a key role in this fight, and shouldn't be overlooked. The reason is that an admin is going to more naturally gravitate to toward the "upsell" products of the hypervisor manufacturer. If you're using ESX, you'll first consider ThinApp (VMware's application virtualization) and VDI, and if they don't offer what you need (unlikely), you're apt to choose those. If you've gone with the Microsoft setup -- Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V -- you're going to first consider System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 as your management console, and App-V (Redmond's app virtualization) as your solutions for those areas (Microsoft's desktop virtualization picture is fuzzier right now, giving VMware and Citrix a decided leg up in that regard). Same with Citrix -- Linux folks who like Xen and have moved to XenServer will give strong consideration to XenApp and XenDesktop.

Simon concedes that Hyper-V is likely to outstrip XenServer in the market, given Microsoft's strategy of using Windows 2008 as the Trojan Horse to slip in Hyper-V. I agree with him on that. But I wonder if that advantage will ultimately result in Citrix taking more aggressive steps to differentiate XenServer from Hyper-V, and less of a buddy-buddy role in the future?

Posted by Keith Ward on 07/02/2008 at 12:48 PM5 comments

The End of Xen?

His main ideas are that XenServer, Citrix's hypervisor, will die off from lacket of market penetration. (Update: I misinterpreted Brian's remarks. He was referring to the open source Xen hypervisor, not Citrix' commercial XenServer implementation). Citrix will start using Hyper-V, from good virtualization buddy Microsoft. At the same time, Brian predicts that the open source community will rally around "KVM," which stands for "Kernel Virtual Machine." KVM has been integrated into the Linux kernel and provides virtualization services, so every Linux server now has a built-in hypervisor. This is further bad news for Xen, Brian argues, as the open source community will abandon Xen development and throw its muscle behind KVM development instead.

Whew! That's a lot of predictions. And they're well reasoned. Will they come true? That's another matter entirely. It seems to me that Brian is a little too dismissive of Citrix's commitment to XenServer. (It's not the first time I've thought that.) I don't see the rationale in spending $500 million to buy a company, only to give up on development of its chief product, which has now become one of your chief products, after less than a year. They're more forward-thinking than that, in my opinion.

(Update: These arguments, although made about XenServer, also apply to Xen. Citrix has sunk a substantial amount of time and money in the Xen community, and all indications to this point show that commitment continuing.)

Additionally, I see no indications, none, that development has slowed around XenServer or the other products appearing in the Xen line, like XenApp, XenDesktop, etc. XenServer is the core of that; would Citrix build those products to work on Hyper-V rather than Xen? Not until there's a lot more market information available that XenServer isn't selling, and won't sell in the future.

I also disagree somewhat on Brian's assertion that

"Hyper-V and the open source Xen hypervisor are so similar, in fact, that one could plausibly argue that Hyper-V is the "Windows version of Xen.""

I'm not sure what Brian's sources are on that, but I've talked to people in the know for both Microsoft and Citrix, and they state that although the two hypervisors interoperate very well, that they are not duplicates, or near duplicates, of each other. They were developed entirely separately, but there is a common perception, in fact, that Hyper-V is based upon Xen. Not true. (Note that I'm not saying Brian is implying this, because he's not. But I do take issue with the general belief that Hyper-V is a Microsoft photocopy of Xen.)

Brian then builds the rest of his argument about the possible ascendency of KVM on the foundation that Citrix will abandon Xen. Certainly, one could see that happening, if Citrix pulls the plug on XenServer. It's also no minor announcement that Red Hat, a couple of weeks ago, announced that it chose KVM over Xen in its embedded hypervisor. The bulk of other vendors, like Virtual Iron, Sun, Novell and Oracle are still building on Xen, though, so I'm not confident that this is the beginning of a rush to KVM and the end of Xen as we know it.

Brian brings up many interesting points, but in the end, I think he's a bit premature. What do you think?

Posted by Keith Ward on 06/30/2008 at 12:48 PM7 comments

Why I Hate the Cisco VPN Client

Let me explain. My main work machine is a MacBook Pro, dual-core Intel with 2GB RAM. Last week I finally upgraded to the Leopard OS, from Tiger. The upgrade went smoothly (although I didn't appreciate the fact that Leopard needed more than 4GB of space to install; I thought it was Windows OSes that were supposed to be bloated?) Then I tried to log on to my company's VPN using the Cisco client.

Nada. No connection. So I trolled around the Internet, looking for solutions. Cisco allegedly has an upgraded version for Leopard. Although the company has one of the most obtuse support sections of any vendor on the Internet, I eventually found the upgrade and installed it.

Zippo, once again. Very exciting.

This forced me to turn to the IT department. I hate doing that -- not that they aren't good, which they are -- but because I'm a "do-it-yourself-er" when it comes to computers (the opposite of how I am with home repairs, where I'm about as useful as my dog). Our Mac specialist recommended I upgrade to the latest version of Leopard, which is 10.5.3 (my install was 5.1). He said that fixed the problem with his Mac. So I did it (the upgrade required another 445MB of space -- joy!) And, to my (sarcasm alert) great shock, it still didn't work. So now I'm waiting for a call from the Mac guy to troubleshoot.

Before you ask, I did all the reboot sequence stuff, along with the Terminal commands to restart the VPN. This means for that for a week now, I've been using Outlook Web Access. Words cannot possibly describe how much I loathe using OWA. To begin with, I run it on my Windows XP VM (VMware Fusion is my VM of choice), so there's a performance hit from having the VM open all day. And why, you ask, do I run a VM instead of accessing OWA through Firefox (my browser of choice) or Safari, the Mac Web browser? Because OWA stinks on ice when viewed through a non-Microsoft browser. Come to think of it, it stinks like spoiled fish even through Internet Explorer, but it's certainly more functional than it is on other browsers.

This isn't my first experience with CISCO VPN client problems. Every time I make a change to the OS, it breaks. Even when it allegedly works, it doesn't work well, and crashes more than any program I have. In short, it makes my work like a lot more difficult, instead of better. That should never happen.

If you, wise readers, have any solutions I haven't tried or thought of, I'm all ears.

Posted by Keith Ward on 06/30/2008 at 12:48 PM9 comments

Hyping Hyper-V

Virtualization is becoming a core strategy for Microsoft. It sees an opportunity in a market that's still at less than 10 percent saturation, and is pouncing. If you need evidence, just look at how quickly it's been pushed through the pipeline: the first public beta was early, the first release candidate was early, and RTM is at least a month, and probably more, early (no definitive date was ever given for the final bits to be released, but spokesperson after spokesperson repeated the "180 days after release of Windows Server 2008" mantra).

It's interesting and ironic that Windows 2008 was one of the most delayed products in Microsoft's long and gory history of delays (initial Microsoft predictions pegged a 2005 release for then "Longhorn" server), but Hyper-V, one of its key pieces, has been slingshotted through the process. It's clear that Microsoft sees the iron as white-hot now, and wanted to strike before getting any further behind VMware's ESX (or Citrix' XenServer, for that matter).

(One interesting side note from my conversation yesterday with Microsoft's Arun Jayendran. I asked specifically if Hyper-V will have an embedded version, similar to ESXi or the embedded versions of XenServer offered by the competition, that hardware OEMs can ship out the door. Jayendran declined comment. That says to me that Microsoft is at least considering it; otherwise I would have expected a "No." Update I've been informed that "Hyper-V Server", the standalone version, will be available to OEMs, same as the other embedded hypervisors. No word on whether it will be tweaked for delivery that way.)

Remember that Hyper-V is an incomplete product. A number of key features, like Live Migration, hot-swap ability, and support for more processors was killed off way back when it was still code named "Viridian." Jayendran affirmed that at least one of those features, Live Migration, will be added with the next version of Hyper-V, likely to be released with the R2 release of Windows 2008.

Still, it's hard to think of a better "Version 1" of a Microsoft product -- ever. I've used it some, and have talked to tons of folks who have used it in beta and in production. They almost uniformly rave about it. In fact, I talked to a consultant who has a number of customers running it in production every day, and have been since the beta days. This consultant, who has no axe to grind -- he makes his money by keeping his clients happy, not by pushing one product over another because of "special deals" or vendor relationships -- now routinely recommends Hyper-V over ESX. And it's not that he hates ESX; quite the opposite. It's just that, with as well as Hyper-V works, he sees a better value proposition in most cases using that instead of VMware.

Does that scare you, VMware? It should. In fact, I expect to see a drastic ESX price cut announced before the end of the year. If VMware thinks it can laugh off Hyper-V, it is sadly -- perhaps fatally -- mistaken. The reality is that ESX is better than Hyper-V; better by a good bit, in fact. The question is whether it's so much better that it can continue to command a premium price. Hypervisors aren't a money-maker anymore; the competitive market, established today by Redmond, will quickly decide that, in my opinion. Heck, even the GUI-less ESXi will cost you $500 a pop, minimum. VMware will have to respond.

The battle has been joined. Will it be to the death?

Posted by Keith Ward on 06/26/2008 at 12:48 PM0 comments

Managing the Infrastructure

The downside is that you have so many more servers to manage. Seeing this, traditional management vendors as well as a plethora of startups are jumping into the fray.

One of the more interesting vendors I've talked to lately is eG Innovations, which makes the eG Monitor for VMware. Srinivas Ramanathan, the company's president and CEO, is a former senior research scientist for HP, so he knows his stuff. He points out, correctly, that a chief weakness of VirtualCenter (VMware's primary management tool for ESX) is its inability to see what's happening inside a VM, into the application itself.

He claims that eG Monitor is different in that it looks not only inside the VM into the app, but looks at the entire infrastructure, at all levels, to troubleshoot. How is this different? "Most [of the] competition's [products] take information from VC [VirtualCenter], without getting inside the VM," Ramanathan says.

The limitations to VC are pretty clear. If you have a problem affecting your Web site response, for example, where does the problem lie? The back-end database server? The VM housing the server? Disk I/O? Network latency? VC can't see most of that. The eG Monitor specializes in tracking down the source of the problem, cutting down analysis time and allowing your admins to be more proactive, instead of spending all their time putting out fires.

Another problem is silo-based monitoring. The company provided a slide deck with its presentation, and one slide in particular was hilarious, because it rang true. When each admin group -- domain admin, virtualization admin, LAN admin, client admin, database admin and the like -- is responsible for only one small piece of the puzzle, passing the buck becomes a tradition. "Hey, my firewall's working OK." "Don't blame me; the DHCP server is running fine." "Nope, our resource utilization is right where it should be." And so on. Using the product to drill down and pinpoint the source of the trouble won't allow your admins that wiggle room.

One of eG's specialties is monitoring a VDI infrastructure; very handy if you're using it, but the value proposition is lessened if you're not.

Another differentiator, according to Ramanathan, is eG Monitor's ability to "autolearn": basically, instead of the admin setting performance thresholds, the Monitor starts gathering information to form the baseline. The Monitor uses "statistical techniques to determine what your norms should be," he adds. It appears that this "autolearn" functionality is getting more popular: Netuitive, another management company, is claiming similar abilities.

In all, these are encouraging trends. But sifting through the deluge of management tools is sure to get you plenty wet. If you've used some of these and would like to review them for us, let me know. If you're not using them, but would like to try them out, also let me know; reviewers get to play with this cool stuff for free!

Posted by Keith Ward on 06/24/2008 at 12:48 PM1 comments