Toon Vanagt

Sneak Preview on VMworld 2008 and its artwork (video).

September 15, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

Virtualization.com made it to Sin City. As of tomorrow and after a partner day, over 14.000 fellow Virtualization geeks will start gathering in The Venetian in Las Vegas for the latest vendor news and extensive networking activities. Virtualization.com is most interested in your stories from the datacenter trenches to the desktop victories. So feel free to share those lessons learnt when you see Toon Vanagt passing by with his camera.

We look forward to the real product innovations (is Cisco going to surprise us?). Judging from the amount of PR announcements we received, you can surely bet on a Virtualization product avalanche rolling over Las Vegas next week. VMWare is expected to release/announce ESX v4.0, with plenty of exiting features (continuous availability, alarms on physical hardware faults, 64bit kernel and COS and more). Information overdose guaranteed, especially with absent competitors, trying to spoil the VMware annual party, by hijacking some of that overal media focus on Virtualization.

VMware hired the prestigious design agency Cahan & Associates and they came up with edgy creations that underline customer ‘references/quotes’ and are supposed to make us all connect at a very human level. If you are into ‘minimalist cool’ and like the artwork too, you will be happy to learn that you can order your own illustration styled photo at YouAreArt. Simply sent your picture, receive a draft after 2 weeks, give the artist feedback and get an original canvas within another 2 weeks.
For the DIY die-hards or those with graphic insight, there is good news too, as they can easily assemble their own illustration styled avatar at FaceYourManga for free.

VMworld promises to be even bigger than last time (wear comfy shoes!) and all sorts of contractors and vendors are very busy gearing up The Venetian’s many meeting rooms: setting up banners, signs, booths, networks, registration desks, 38 Wifi hotspots, labs, etc…

Try not to spend all your money on the gambling floor, as over 200 exhibitors would like you to buy some of their latest products too 🙂

Here is to a great VMworld 2008 and a lot of fun!

Video interview with George Kurian, Vice President and General Manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco (Part 2/2)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this second part of our interview with George Kurian, he explains about the capabilities of VFrame; being Cisco’s system’s management and provisioning that is aimed at the virtualized network and helps to put the virtual puzzle together.

Cisco recognizes the data center as a heterogeneous multivendor environment and plans to supports 3rd party technologies in the future. Cisco sees the notion of what a computer is today, getting truly blended closely with the network as interconnect speeds go up dramatically over the next two to three years.

Despite a fast moving environment Virtualization also offers IT professionals a significant career opportunity.

What is most important in the virtualization world is to not to think about your data center as traditional silos of storage, server, network, firewall, application…we need to bring virtualization into the network…we talked about both the Catalyst switches as well as the Nexus family and recently, our entire application delivery portfolio; application switching LAN acceleration techniques have got virtualization technology integrated into them. The second is …to bring networking intelligence into the virtual machine environment itself. So the ability to provide failover, traffic management, switching securities, and load balancing, those technologies that historically sat at the physical interface between the server and the network. The port now moved into the virtual machine and that’s really the technology roadmap for the next twelve months…

At Virtualization.com we are curious, if Cisco is going to make related products announcements at VMworld 2008.

Read the full transcript below or return to the first part.

0:05 Cisco has also announced VFrame? What type of capabilities does that offer?

George Kurian: VFrame which a system’s management and provisioning tool which we announced at Cisco Live a year ago, really helps to put together the virtualized network that compliments the virtual server environment. As we talked about to make virtualization real and operationally efficient, you need to have a virtualized network to compliment the virtual server and one of the things that our data center customers were telling us about is: ‘what’s most important in the virtualization world is to not to think about your data center as traditional silos of storage, server, network, firewall, application’. What they really are looking for is the service, which is putting all these virtual elements together. Now, VFrame especially with the VFrame 1.2 release, which we announced at Cisco Live this week, really completes putting together the virtual network environment. It’s got support for virtual LANs as well as virtual firewalls and recently, virtual load balancers as well as virtual storage. That really gives you a complete networking environment and then…

1:21 And also how to manage that?

Kurian: Yes.

1:23 Is that policy-based management?

Kurian: Policy-based provisioning tools and template-based provisioning models and what’s also interesting in the VFrame 1.2 release is we married that capability also now with the virtual server environment where VFrame 1.2 has tight integration with the VMware control center that allows you now to use the same policy-based provisioning model for VMware ESX servers.

1:49 Right. Are you trying to support other hypervisor, Xen, Hyper-V?

Kurian: Yeah. We absolutely recognized that the data center is a heterogenous multivendor environment. So, we’ll support other technologies in the future.

2:02 You just talked about the classic silos that are breaking up and do you see that the network manager and operator need broader skills to match all those new fields ? It is no longer just about the server and the firewalls and securities, storage. It’s all merging into the network.

Kurian: Absolutely. We see that virtualization offers all IT professionals a significant career opportunity to advance their own careers, and for the networking professionals themselves, we see that virtualization if you take advantage of the trend allows you to advance your career.

2:45 Do you have a role there? Could you help them or are you planning to…?

Kurian: Absolutely. Yes. At Ciscowe recognized to make virtualization work and be successful, our networking professionals need a much deeper understanding of the server storage and even application environments so that they can break through these silos. One of the things that we announced at Cisco Live this week was an augmentation to both our CCIE certification for our networking professionals that allows them to take advantage of new training and tools and get themselves data center CCIE certified. So in essence, they move from being a device and element management professional to actually a data center architect. The second was a series of programs for our channel partners so that they can also take advantage of these opportunities to be able to position themselves from being networking solution providers to really data center architects and solution providers. So, it’s called the data center network infrastructure program that we’ve made available now to our channel partners.

4:00 What about security evolutions, because today many organizations use VLANs to manage LAN security between the virtual machines, how do you see this evolve?

Kurian: There’re two aspects of what we see. I think the first is, as we talked about it, we need to bring into the switches and routers and security devices, the ingredients of virtualization. So, we need to bring virtualization into the network that phase is well underway. As we talked about both the Catalyst switches as well as the Nexus family and recently, our entire application delivery portfolio; application switching LAN, acceleration techniques have got virtualization technology integrated into them. The second is the phase that we are embarking upon and where we make very significant announcements over the next twelve months is to bring now networking intelligence into the virtual machine environment itself. So the ability to provide failover, traffic management, switching securities, and load balancing, those technologies that historically sat at the physical interface between the server and the network. The port now moved into the virtual machine and that’s really the technology roadmap for the next twelve months. So, stay posted for a lot of exciting announcements.

5:25 I think anything that will help the people in managing infrastructure is going to be curious from which management software is really going to be able to control all of these new features.

Kurian: Yeah. I think what we see, architecturally is a unified policy management model where you can implement policy for your physical servers and also extend that into the virtual domain and then from the product construct, you really see software extensions to our switching platforms.

5:59 How do you see the future of virtualization evolve? Where would you think is ahead of them in this field?

Kurian: I’d only think what we see are a couple of important things. I think the first is if you think about networking speeds and latency getting faster and faster and lower and lower respectively, you can, in essence, really extend virtualization to all aspects of IT systems. So, we do see down the road the opportunity to drive things like processor virtualization, memory virtualization, as interconnect speeds and latencies go up dramatically over the next two to three years. So, really the notion of what the computer gets truly blended closely with the network. In addition, I think when we see virtualization, we also see it extended into the application domain because today what we see is the IT infrastructures virtualize but on top of that, you’re having relatively monolithic and static applications, but what we see down the road there is that you can literally have any application be delivered to any device across any network.

7:15 George, thanks a lot for your insights and all the things you’ve told us about virtualization here at Cisco and we look forward to all those product announcements over the next few months.

Kurian: Keep posted. It’s an exciting time.

Video interview with George Kurian, Vice President and General Manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco (Part 1/2)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

In this first part of our interview with George Kurian at Cisco’s headquarters we get to know how Cisco looks at Virtualization in the datacenter from three different sets of product capabilities: pervasive networking platforms, services and VFrame (provisioning and orchestration tools).

From his position as the vice president and general manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco, he sees the need for server virtualization to be complemented with virtualization capabilities in the network and explains how his teams are engineering the network to be a facilitator for all the virtues Virtualization brings. The goal for George’s data center technology group is to make the network aware of the new atomic unit in the data center: the Virtual Machine and no longer the physical server or port. He goes on pointing to the Nexus series and new introductions for the Catalyst series with capabilities to support some of these (r)evolutionary trends in the data center. In essence Cisco is reducing the number of connections that the server has to have from roughly eight today to only two, thus simplifying power, cooling, cabling, the whole series of transformations in the data center and then from an operational standpoint, providing a single network that you need to manage.

Read the full transcript below or go to the second part.

0:04 George, welcome to Virtualization.com. Could you tell a little bit more about yourself and what you’re doing here at Cisco?

George Kurian: Hi Toon. I’m George Kurian and I’m the vice president and general manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit. We’re part of the engineering organization at Cisco and within Cisco’s engineering team, we are part of the data center technology group, the group that builds all our switching and so services platforms for the data center.

0:30 Okay and how does Cisco think about the data center and virtualization in particular?

Kurian: First of all, in terms of the data center itself, we looked at the data center from the lines of three different sets of capabilities, product capabilities. The first are pervasive networking interconnect platforms such as our Catalyst 6500 platforms that provide LAN to server connections. Platforms such as our MDS platforms which are for storage interconnects, InfiniBand which provide inter process or cluster communication interconnects, and in addition that recently introduced, the Nexus 5000 family, that provides access interconnects for servers to the network. So in essence of range of interconnect platforms, layered on top of that are services such as security services, load balancing application delivery services, WAN acceleration services that drives the performance of applications from the data center to the remote branches, and then putting all of that together is a layer of provisioning and orchestration tools that we call VFrame. So networking platforms, services and provisioning tools.

1:52 Okay. Let’s start off on how one can capture all the benefits like one of the major benefits of virtual machines that you can relocate, just put a lot of strain on the network? How did you deal with that?

Kurian: In essence, we believe, Toon, that virtualization of the server environment needs to be complimented with virtualization capabilities in the network. Because to be able to get the benefits of efficiency plus flexibility in that server virtualization tries to create, you need to have the network be a facilitator of all of that. So, specifically, some of the benefits that virtual machine motion has as well as different fail over scenarios that customers are used to around the physical machine environment bringing that to the virtual machine environment needs the network to be virtual machine aware so that you can have what we call transparent virtualization, and so a lot of work we’re doing in the data center technology group is to make the network aware now of the new atomic unit in the data center which is no longer the physical server and what we forever call the port but really now the virtual machine itself.

3:12 That’s also a big change if you look at like the Catalyst series as well as the jack-of-all trades where you would just plug in a firewall, routing device or whatever; whereas now, we’re moving to a whole new situation because some people call it the flat layered two-domain mess that is being created by virtual machines and hypervisors. How do you cope with that?

Kurian: The Nexus series of products as well as the Catalyst have important new introductions of capabilities to support some of the evolutionary trends that you see in a data center, right? The first one, which is still the most used by customers, is what we call server consolidation and standardization. This is the movement from a variety of distributed computing environments to a few standardized X86 environments in the data center. What consolidation especially with the movement of multiprocessor CPUs does is it drives a much higher density and bandwidth per slot. So the Catalyst as well as the Nexus 7000 series for example are much more dense platforms. In addition, what we see is the movement from more client to server-oriented applications to some of the more server-to-server communication paradigms introduced by Web 2.0 and other types of new applications. It drives a lot of what we call cross-sectional bandwidth and so there are new innovations both by the Nexus 5000 and 7000 series that take advantage of those new types of platforms.

Now, one of the new trends that we are seeing as part of what we announced, which we call the unified fabric, is the consolidation of a variety of currently heterogenous networking environments in the data center into a single unified networking fabric. The most important of the networking environments in the data center classically the LAN, which is an Ethernet environment, and then storage, which has historically been a Fiber Channel environment. What we announced in the end of January is what we call the unified fabric and what the unified fabric essentially does is bring some of the best elements of Ethernet simplicity, scalability, and cost efficiency together with the needs of fiber channel, for example, lossless transport, lower latency, and so on. And so we see that really transforming the next generation data center. In essence, reducing the number of connections that the server has to have from roughly eight today to two simplifying power, cooling, cabling, the whole series of transformations in the data center and then from an operational standpoint, providing a single network that you need to manage.

6:12 Okay. Are you working on standardization, an industry standards, to do this?

Kurian: Yes. We’re working with a combination of an industry partner ecosystem with players like the Intel and IBM and others as well as the ITF and some standardization bodies…We try to standardize some of these key technologies such as Fiber Channel over Ethernet.

6:36 What of type of bandwidth do you see within the Fiber Channels over Ethernet? We’re at 10 gigabyte today.

Kurian: Right.

6:41 How would that evolve? What timing do you think we’ll be able to do this?

Kurian: There’s certainly a movement in the Fiber Channel work to bring out 8 Gigabyte Fiber Channel on the Ethernet side. The two next levels of performance are 40 Gb and 100 Gb Ethernets. There’s a standard work in both of those performance levels that are in process.

7:08 Okay. When we talked about the virtualization capabilities that you want to build into the network, could you maybe tell a little bit about the differences there between the Nexus architecture and the Catalyst architecture?

Kurian: In essence, the benefits of Nexus and the Catalyst are roughly similar when you consider the interactions between the server and the network, right? I think what the Nexus certainly does is take density and per slot performance to a whole new level as well as what we see in the Nexus is the increased intelligence on the port basis because what we see in the Nexus world where we really have built that to be the platform of the next ten to fifteen years of data center. The physical NIC on server has now a lot more traffic behind and a lot more application environments hosted behind it so we brought a lot more per-port intelligence for example into the Nexus. We will see that intelligence also coming into upcoming versions of the Catalyst as well but that’s one of the hallmarks that we bring.

8:15 Today, that it really one of the bottlenecks in virtualization, all the I/O virtualization, going on?
Kurian: That’s right. In essence, you want to have quality of service now at the NIC itself right, because you’ve got this disparate application environment sitting behind that single physical interface.

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 2/4)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

In this second part of our lengthy video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, we get further introduced to how HP defines virtualization and how it differentiates from its competitors.

Nick also shares what typical Virtualization problems his clients are grappling with and what skill set is needed in IT departments to overcome the pitfalls.

Read the full transcript below, return to part 1 or go ahead to part 3

0:12 HP has one of the most complete virtualization solutions offerings. How are these portfolios integrated?
Nick Van Der Zweep: That’s really where we started with some of our management software as I mentioned in the Integrity space back in 1999-2000.We had high availability and partitioning and pay-as-you-go and instant capacity in management software and we glued it all together so that we produce one-user interspace to that environment. Just recently, we announced and started shipping last month Inside Dynamics which takes that software, makes it available to go to Integrity, ProLiant, X86. One management footprints Systems Inside Manager which is known across the industry as one management software for ProLiant, Integrity, Discovery, fault management and from there it manages all the hypervisors up there, we can…

1:08 Does it do deployment automatically?

Van Der Zweep: So, we’ve got deployment built in to it so through a WRAP Deployment Packet of deployed into bare-metal and they’re deployed to virtual machines. We support Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and so we took that software that higher level of management software Inside Dynamic VSC which represent VSC in the integrity space and really glued it together. What’s really interesting right now is that we can provide hypervisor-like capabilities even to bare metal machines and that interface brings that all together. You can’t even tell if you’re working on bare-metal machine versus a VMware hypervisor. You can do moves from moving application from place to place within the infrastructure and whether be bare metal or its using VMware behind the scenes so definitely heavy integrated.

2:05 I’m very interested to know how HP views its competitive landscape in the virtualization industry?

Van Der Zweep: I think, we are extremely well positioned in the industry to be able to help our customers in the whole virtualization space and then also help HP and our shareholders as well. And because we’ve got the capabilities of covering this from desktop to the data center, we have a huge what we call a personal systems group where we sell desktops, Thin clients, Blade PCs, virtual desktop environments. So we are heavily invested in that side of the technology as well as the server side technology as well. Storage virtualization, server virtualization, we have a huge multi-billion dollar software organization within HP to deliver infrastructure management, our Opsware/Mercury capabilities are layered on top of that as well. So, we’ve got a technological portfolio that I think is a number one bar in the industry that anybody looks at. And then the services portfolio to be able to help customers, architectural data centers, to data center transformations, look at everything from power cooling environmental pieces of the puzzle because that’s comes in to virtualization very quickly as well as you know because we can design the data centers, and as well help people and customers to do installation support and ITIL practice because as you go into a shared environment and now your employees are sharing resources. Well you better standardize the jobs across the data centers. So the people who are doing server administration are all doing it the same way, not doing it one way for SAP environment and another way for their Exchange environment, because it’s all shared infrastructure.

3:59 Do you think we need a new skill set out there? Now their tasks are merging: for the networking people and security people and storage people. They’re really now have to talk together?

Van Der Zweep: They absolutely do. So, there are two things that happen that we focus on that. I think it’s really happening to the industry. One is standardizing their roles and responsibilities so that and their interlocks so that they can talk to each other. But then again we do things that simplify the processes, automate the processes. If you look at the likes of Opsware or even our Blade environment, we added something called virtual connect to our Blade environment putting in a virtual fabric, a virtual back plain. Now, what we’re able to do with Virtual Connect Blades and Inside Dynamics is move a Microsoft Exchange environment running on one blade through a point and click, move it to another Blade in another enclosure. If you try to do that today within a typical datacenter, you’ve got to call up the server guy to install that on the new Blade. You have to call the network guy up and have them move the VLAN information from that node to that node and you have to call up the SAN storage guy to say “I’m going to reroute all the SAN in order to make that movement happen”. Whether or not you have hypervisors or not, you got to set all of these up three people which means a week worth of work. We can do it point and click everything is automated. All the steps happened and it’s done. So, it’s a matter of working better together from a people perspective but also delivering technologies that bust through the processes of the past and automate them as well.

5:43 What are the typical issues that your customers are grappling with today?

Van Der Zweep: The typical issues that they grapple with today certainly is out of macro level cost, how do we drive down cost agility, how do I be more responsive to the business so that when they say, “Hey I’m one of deploy infrastructure or new application or scale up I want to do that today. I don’t want to do that in a month,” and then service levels. People are constantly saying I’m moving towards more of an environment where instead of that it’s just one mission critical system on that one server that keeps the business running, everything is kind of connected together with the applications that we have today, services oriented architectures and such where you’ve got ten or hundreds of pieces of infrastructure that are working in concept which each other and you have to have a high availability to everything and so they are want to get that built in without complex clustering.

6:45 What about the greener side of ITs, there is also a lot of buzz around the green data centers, do you find that your customers –due to boosting energy costs- are looking for for cheap electricity bills and renewable energy sources and are they actually looking at what is this server consuming and if that’s being underutilized to have like lesser power being consumed?

Van Der Zweep: Absolutely. So, we have customers especially in the enterprise based that have data centers that within the next what three, four, five years they do not have enough power to handle the growth where is that they’re having within that environment. Well, they’d have to build an entire new data centers and that’s cost thing. And they don’t feel good about it from an environmental perspective and the cost that they pay to the utilities. So they’re concerned about that. So virtualization can help there with the software that I described with Inside Dynamics, what we built into this release is that we’ve put in the ability to do consolidation and it will automatically come back to you with scenarios. Here is your current scenario, and this is exactly how many kilowatts you’re using per month and you enter into it. You tell what your rates are, so it says you’re paying three hundred and fifty dollars a month for these systems for energy. And then it comes back and says, “Well here is the new environment consolidated using virtualization.” And we can actually tell you its hundred fifteen dollars a month is your exact energy cost that you would be paying versus today versus option A or maybe option B or C that was exciting when we were in Barcelona demonstrating this and we had four people deep and four people wide sitting in front of one screen looking at this and one person is going I need you to put in my rates for Sweden and share this because I got to bring this home. It’s a hot area.

VMware and Parallels Are Not Hyperventilating on Hyper-V Launch by Microsoft (video interviews)

July 3, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

Last week we happened to be at VMware’s headquarters when Microsoft launched Hyper-V, Redmond’s much anticipated built-in hypervisor for Windows Server 2008. So we got our camera rolling to capture VMware’s reaction on Microsoft’s free hypervisor offering. Straight after that exclusive interview, we flew from Silicon Valley to New York to collect more video feedback from Parallels. Both vendors calmly welcomed Microsoft to the bare-metal hypervisor market and underlined Hyper-V is only a first version product release from Microsoft, missing critical features, which virtualization spoiled clients can no longer miss in their datacenters.

The video is also up on YouTube, Steamocracy and Blip.tv.

As an introduction to novice readers, we shortly explain the difference between Hyper-V (a bare-metal hypervisor), and the older Virtualization products Microsoft has been marketing, such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server (sometimes confusingly referred to as hosted hypervisors). Hyper-V is a bare-metal hypervisor (commonly referred to as Type 1 or Native Virtualization), which is software that runs directly on the hardware, as an operating system control program. A guest operating system such as Windows, Solaris or Linux thus runs at the second level above the hardware. This means Hyper-V is only a thin abstraction layer which boots on the native hardware and thus provides hardware abstraction services to the operatingsystem environment (performing some of the functions of an OS kernel). This differs from hosted hypervisors (commonly referred to as Type 2 or Host-Based Virtualization), which is software that runs within an operating system environment (Host). A guest operating system (Virtual Machine) thus runs at the third level above the host and the underlying hardware. Bare-metal hypervisors are supposedly faster and more enterprise scalable. The disadvantages are most of these hypervisors are hardware dependent and usually require hardware support to get the most out of the virtualized feature set (i.e. Intel VT or AMD-V processors).

At VMware we got a first reaction on Hyper-V from John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing: “Hyper-V is a first generation product. It is a hypervisor that runs virtual machines and that is what Vmware has been doing since back in 2000-2001. What it doesn’t offer is a whole set of virtual infrastructure capabilities, that would run on top of a hypervisor. Things like: Live migration with VMotion or resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines. These are really fundamental capabilities that our customers tell us are required for doing production consolidation or for providing high-availability for virtual machines or for running a disaster recovery solution on top of Virtualization. So from our perspective Hyper-V is a first generation product. Our customers are asking for a whole rich virtualization set of virtual infrastructure software that goes well beyond just a hypervisor.”

Kurt Daniel, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Online at Parallels went on to add “…we actually are a big partner of Microsoft and them of us in the hosting and Software-as-a-Service-markets for Virtualization and Automation. In the general market we see Hyper-V as being late to the market and having a platform deficit… It is also a little bit of ‘now you see it and now you don’t get it’-Virtualization in terms of missing live migration that was initially promised. That is a ticket-to-entry-feature that Parallels offers …Finally we think IT pro’s and developers are not fooled by the low price [free with the Windows Server 2008 OS ]…and we think it does fall short in this early release”

Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Iron summarizes it this way “Even more importantly, Hyper-V doesn’t have the mobility, high availability, recoverability and load balancing capabilities that actually make server virtualization valuable to customers. Yes, it will provide server consolidation, but that is the easier part of server virtualization and for most customers, not where the real value is.”

Sun’s Senior Director of xVM, Vijay Sarathy markets his concerns as follows “We’re glad to see Microsoft finally entering the hypervisor market. Customers are hungry for virtualization solutions that support a wide range of operating systems and virtualization platforms. Simply put, Sun is committed to building a heterogeneous (Windows, Linux and Solaris) and interoperable (ESX and Hyper-V) virtualization platform. To that end, Sun has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, supporting Windows as a guest operating system on Sun’s xVM Server hypervisor…With Sun xVM VirtualBox, xVM VDI, xVM Server and xVM Ops Center Sun provides a holistic approach to Windows-focused customers looking for virtualization and management solutions. We’ve already seen great traction with Sun xVM VirtualBox, the industry’s first free and open source hypervisor to offer support for all major operating systems, including Windows, which has already been downloaded more than 5 million times.”

Microsoft’s missing Virtrualization feature list

Reading through the reactions from the competitiors make the missing feature list look something like this:

No Live Virtual Machine relocation/migration capabilities: The ability to seamlessly live-move guest virtual machines from one physical server to another is offered by most Virtualization vendors, with products such as VMware VMotion , Parallels Virtuozzo, Citrix XenMotion, … These zero downtime migration capabilities are the most pointed at by the competition, but this cutting-edge feature seems less high on the priority list of SMB virtualization prospects with consolidation on their minds.
Platform deficit (limited to Windows and Suse Linux Enterprise). In the glory days of the Bill Gates-era ‘Microsoft Windows’ was almost a synonym for ‘X86 desktop and server operating system’. So supporting a non-windows OS like Suse Linux is a fairly new ball game in Redmond and we are curious how this trend will develop into wider support of guest operating systems and distributions in Linux, BSD and Solaris…
No hypervisor virtual machine transformation tools from competitor’s VM-formats into Microsoft’s VHD-format. Those who manage heterogeneous environments are impatiently waiting for the virtualization industry to embrace the DMTF Open Virtual Format (OVF) to ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. This should allow Microsoft System Center VMM to manage XenServer by using DMTF CIM based interfaces. All this openness with a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format promises transformation of a complete application workload with resource requirements, configuration and customization parameters, license and signatures to facilitate appliance integrity and security checking…
Unproven and uncertain security levels are an easy and all-time favorite for competitors to throw at Microsoft. However their use of a full version of Microsoft Windows for the parent partition (fully trusted by Hyper-V) seems ‘courageous ’ as it extends the hypervisor attack surface.
Limited virtual structure management capabilities. Although this and the next points cannot be expected from a pure hypervisor, many competitors point at an incomplete offering. It should be noted that the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) is currently downloadable in open beta testing and integration can be expected with Operation Manager (SCOM), Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM).
No resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines (VM)
No virtual desktop management

Although Jason Perlow over at ZDnet is quite enthusiastic about Hyper-V, he does point to an additional Hyper-V Manager shortcoming when it comes to the administration and guest installation. “Unfortunately, Hyper-V Manager can only run natively in Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit) or on Vista SP1, so you will either need to administrate it from a few token Vista machines using the RSAT tools, via RDP connection, or directly from the Windows Server 2008 server console itself. RDP from a Terminal Server client itself is fine, as screen performance and response time is very good and runs even on Open Source Oses. However, RDP is infuriating to work from while a guest OS is being installed for the first time. For some odd reason, Hyper-V actually prevents you from using a mouse in a guest console window until the Integration Tools are actually installed, so you’ll have to be skilled in using the key when installing a guest from remote if you keep XP or Linux at your desk. Hopefully, your datacenter uses IP KVM infrastructure if you don’t want to stand up a Vista system or another copy of Server 2008 on your desk to administrate your remote boxes for those times you do a guest install from scratch.” Jason goes on to applaud Microsoft for “…releasing the Hypercall Adapter into GPL, so both community and commercial Linux distributions will be able to take advantage of Hyper-V” .

We are confident that Mike Neil and his team at Microsoft are working hard to get those ‘missing’ features in future Virtualization product releases and it is believed Microsoft and Citrix/XenServer are collaborating on merging the code additions from the Hypercall Adapter into the upstream Linux Xen Kernel, so that in the future, a separate Hypercall Adapter will not be necessary for Linux.

Independent analyst and blogger Brian Madden boldly predicts that Citrix XenServer might drop Xen as the underlying virtualization engine and switch to Hyper-V in order to put the ‘relationship’ between Microsoft and Citrix back in balance. He reminds us that the Hyper-V and Xen architecture are much alike. We hesitate if IT-relationships make you lose your ‘soul’ so easily, but will treat Brian to a round of free drinks if his unlikely prediction becomes true in the near future. We do know the Xen-community would be relieved to be able to add the Xen brand name to its products again.

It is interesting to read no competitors are hinting directly at potential stability issues, they do all repeat the CIO-mantra of not adopting a Redmond first version for mission critical systems. Even though Microsoft itself relies on Hyper-V for its own datacenters to handle a part of its live traffic.

There seems no more money to be made in ‘basic’ hypervisors (mobile devices might be the short term exception to this rule). So vendors have to excel in a niche or extend to a complete virtualization portfolio where their product offering supports a large number operating systems, with minimal hypervisor overhead to boost guest performance, open API’s and holistic management tools around the hypervisor to easily manage both the virtual and physical infrastructure components as servers, desktops, network, storage while taking care of securityy, high-availibility and disaster recovery. They might even have to throw in a connection broker (VDI). Those broad virtualization vendors that manage to ‘host’ a profitable third-part eco-system around their own products seem to have the best long term perspective for large market adoption.

Our guess is that Microsoft preferred to release an ‘incomplete’ hypervisor 1.0 ahead of schedule to aim for the SMB-market in the short term and get partners on their train. Microsoft sacrified the announced ‘Live migration’-capabilities from the Hyper-V feature set to shorten the time to market. But in a few quarters we expect Microsoft to approach their corporate clients with a Hyper-V 2.0 release that could put them on par with the competition’s richer feature sets. By that time Microsoft might also be able to boast about its fully integrated offering within their management tool family and a wider support of non-Microsoft operating systems and a list add-on products by external partners.

Time will tell. In the mean time we will continue to cover on the hypervisor battles from the trenches of our beloved Virtualization industry.

Talk back in comments below and let us know what experience Hyper-V gives you or which top 5 industry players you expect to rule in a year and for which niche markets; such as the hypervisor market, the host-based virtualization industry, virtual desktop infrastructure or even for the holistic virtual and physical infrastructure management suites.