Recently in Virtualization Category

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's Bob Muglia mentions that even facing VMware's huge headstart Hyper-V is gaining marketshare. Of course, specifics are lacking, but he did let slip that it's making substantial gains in the SMB market, which is unsurprising considering that the market's traditionally been one of the company's strong suits. Looks like a significant number of SMBs haven't been taking the advice of Dell's Erik Dithmer's to skip virtualization tech, to Microsoft's delight.

He also let slip this very interesting nugget captured by Eric Savitz of Barron's:

Finding that many companies to do side-by-side adoption of MSFT's Hyper V and VMware. In side-by-side, we have a 90% win rate, he says. What we are seeing, he says, is doing side-by-side as customers add incremental servers to existing VMware installations.

Muglia also shares an interesting statistic, revealing that roughly 20 percent of all servers shipped are virtualized. And while enterprise adoption skews higher, it still means that the vast majority of servers are likely running underutilized. But Microsoft doesn't seem to be sweating it. Why? Azure, the software giant's cloud computing platform.

While betting on the cloud might pay off, it's not without its risks. In his report on Azure at GigaOM Pro (sub. req'd), Derrick Harris zeroes in on a potential speedbump to widespread adoption: trust. Can Microsoft win over customers in an arena where openness rules? That's just one of the issues it has to wrestle with.

Mind you, he has servers to sell, so salt, grains and all that good stuff...

Erik Dithmer, general manager of Small Medium Business Americas for Dell is telling SMB's to hold their horses on virtualization. Gene Marks, author of "Penny Pincher's Almanac," writes in BusinessWeek:

For many small businesses like mine, Dithmer doesn't recommend it. Thanks, Erik. I completely agree. Virtualization refers to the process of installing multiple "virtual" servers on a single computer. The idea is that instead of having a bunch of machines operating at only a fraction of capacity, put a single machine more fully to use. IT guys and computer companies have been drooling over this stuff for years.

Why? Because many IT guys are just like Balloon Dad. They like to make claims about virtualization to suit their own personal aims. Balloon Dad seemed to be pitching a new reality TV show. For IT guys, the aim is to persuade clients, particularly small business clients, to panic and fly into action and adopt an unnecessary technology just to make a few more bucks for themselves.

Obviously, this article was aimed at the technologically unsophisticated SMB set. If you have a handful of well-managed and reliable systems in your server room/closet, then it's simply not worth upsetting the balance. However, some SMBs are small businesses in name only.

While the employee count may be minuscule, some small businesses control some massive IT resources, and it's these that can really benefit from the virtualization's energy saving potential. Also as one commenter noted, other benefits include the redundancy and flexibility that comes from decoupling operating systems and critical apps from hardware.

The lesson? Just like no two small businesses are the same, neither are their IT requirements. Do your research, dabble in the technology (VMware and Microsoft have freebies and trials that give you a sense of what the tech can do) and go into your meetings with vendors informed.

The greenest datacenter is the one you don't have to build, according to thin computing provider Wyse Technology. The firm today unveiled Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA) software that brings performance gains generally associated with WAN acceleration offerings to virtual desktops and thin clients.

Wyse VDA works transparently in the background with Citrix ICA, Microsoft RDP, and VMware View to bring the remote desktop or cloud computing experience closer to LAN-like levels by minimizing the impact of network latency and reducing packet loss. And the perky performance should be noticeable, says the product page. "Wyse VDA accelerates Microsoft RDP and Citrix ICA protocols by up to 3 times on networks with up to 300ms latency and at least 768 kbps downstream bandwidth."

Wyse estimates that VDA can double or triple a datacenter's geographic reach in terms of acceptable performance for remote end-users, thus eliminating the need to dot the landscape with computing centers every couple hundred miles to service them. Naturally, the fewer (or smaller) the datacenters you use, the less it costs to power your IT operations.

Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator is available now for Microsoft Windows XP Pro and as an component of some Wyse thin clients and ThinOS 6.4 systems.

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Reuters is reporting that VMware is offering a 40 percent discount to Virtual Iron customers if they make the switch. Virtual Iron, which tailored virtualization solutions toward SMBs, was bought by Oracle in May and was promptly shuttered as a business.

VMware is being tight-lipped about the promotion. A little counter-intuitive, no? In any case, with Oracle, Microsoft and the open source community gearing up to challenge the market leader, it's no surprise things are going to turn a little more competitive.

The FAA is nearly finished with a modernization project that relies heavily on virtual machines to process messages for the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, segmenting data for federal and civil air traffic and bringing legacy functionality and newer IP systems under one umbrella.

DailyTech reports that the project allows the agency to replace decades-old mainframes with quad-core Xeon servers from Stratus Technologies. Fitting, right?

And while evolving technology is all well and good, other efficiencies are being gained by the approach:

Virtualization also is helping the system with its upgrade needs. States Mr. Mcneill, "It's travel to a facility for a hardware installation, power modification, training -- it's very costly and time-consuming to have to do all that. Now with this common server using virtualization, we can have a template for an operating system and provision a new service in days, requiring no facility upgrade or travel."

And as one eagle-eyed commenter points out, the tally for the entire project is $860,000. Money well spent indeed.

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Wondering what CA has in store for virtual servers and private clouds running vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V hardware?

CA today announced that it is streamlining the management of VMware vSphere 4 platform on Cisco Nexus 1000V infrastructures by adding support for both in the company's Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager offerings. Under the management platform, administrators get a unified view of affected hardware and virtual servers; a system that prioritizes and traces events to their root cause resulting in fewer alarms; and real-time monitoring and automation capabilities.

CA's object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter(TM) Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

The consolidation of physical and virtual management is inevitable. Expect the lines to blur even further.

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Games are taxing enough on PC hardware, why would you want to add virtualization's overhead?

Over at Gamasutra, Neil Gower writes that capable, modern-day hardware makes virtualization something game developers should consider for their development environments and all but the most GPU-intensive efforts.

Overall, virtual machines provide a surprisingly capable platform. In fact, for pure number crunching (CPU and memory) you're only paying a tiny penalty for the conveniences provided by the VM. If you are I/O bound, things aren't quite as cut-and-dry, but still worth considering. For example, if you want to set up a build server on a VM or virtualize your development environment, you'll want look into the disk optimization features of the virtualization host. For much of what we do with our computers though, we don't actually max out the performance of the hardware (at least not for very long), so the VM overhead is not a big factor.

I suspect it will be a while before you and I can run Crysis smoothly on a VM (yes I went there). Or will it?

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Desktop Virtualization seems like a great way to save energy and reduce desktop support. But experts warn that technology that can streamline the datacenter doesn't necessarily translate into a cure-all for the topsy-turvy world of desktop support.

Denise Dubie of Network World explores Desktop Virtualization Pros and Cons and is able to glean some great insights, including...

For John Turner, desktop virtualization isn't the right move yet. The director of networks and systems at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., says his group evaluated the possibility of extending their successful server virtualization implementation to the desktop and the argument didn't stand up. For one, being a university it would be a challenge to "lock down" a PC image for the majority of students, faculty and others to use. And without solid support for streaming video across the virtual PCs, Turner says he couldn't sign on just yet.

Also discussed are network and shared storage requirements as well as some economics that penny-pinching--or shortsighted--CIOs may find off-putting. A definite must-read.

Today Dell made of flurry of virtualization related announcements. Among the most intriguing are two, quasi-turnkey virtual infrastructure packages, one for full-fledged datacenters and another for SMBs:

Data Center Virtualization Configuration: The unified virtualization platform with pre-configured architectures combines Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology, with Cisco Catalyst networking switches, VMware vSphere 4 and Platespin Migrate from Novell to achieve an intelligent, automated data center.

Small and Medium Business Virtualization Configuration: The Dell virtualization configuration combines the PowerEdge R710, Dell PowerVault MD3000i, PowerVault DL2000 powered by Symantec for backup and PowerConnect networking technology together with Microsoft's virtualization suite, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Essentials and System Center-Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to reduce cost and simplify management of virtualization.

Notice the platforms for each, VMware for larger enterprises and Microsoft for SMBs... Interesting, but not unexpected.

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Liz van Dijk over at AnandTech has written the first part of a fantastically informative primer on virtualization and the hardware required to run VMs smoothly based on their own first-hand research. A must-read if your shop is eyeing VMware ESX. Here's a snippet:

General I/O: This is the one thing VMware will admit to causing a few applications to be simply "unvirtualizable". ESX at this point can maintain roughly 100,000 IOPS (vSphere is rumored to push this up to 350,000) and a maximum of 600 disks, which is a relatively impressive number considering a hefty Exchange installation requires something to the tune of 5000 IOPS. Counting at roughly 0.3 IOPS per user, that would account for over 16000 users, though of course this number might vary depending on the setup and user profiles. However, there are applications that simply require more IOPS, and they'll experience quite a lot of trouble under ESX...

Catch the rest of "Optimizing for Virtualization" here.