Free Webinar On Server Virtualization

In my conversations with organizations implementing server virtualization, I've found that there seems to be a gap opening between the number of virtual machines firms are willing to run on a server, and the maximum number that could still reasonably fit on there. It looks like this will be aggravated by newer servers that can run twice as many virtual machines, along with more mature virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere that will support up to a TB of physical RAM. How long will it be before IT is expected to support 50 or 75 VMs per server?

If you want to learn more about this topic, please join my complimentary Webinar, "Forrester’s Top Three Recommendations For Implementing Server Virtualization" on June 11th at 11AM EST. You can register for the session by visiting:

www.forrester.com/virtualizationwebinar

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's research.

Are Big Boxes Better For Server Virtualization?

From time to time, someone will ask me if it makes sense to purchase a large (32+ CPU) server as a big virtualization host running a VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix hypervisor.

In a word, I think the answer is "no".

Here are a few reasons why:

• First, very few virtualization users that I’m aware of have selected anything larger than 4-socket systems. Massive servers with 32 processors simply cost too much on a per-VM basis, and since you end up dividing them up into smaller virtual machines, there’s not much benefit to go with a massive system. Most hypervisors don’t support more than four virtual processors per virtual machine (including VMware -- you have to purchase the top-of-the-line Enterprise Plus to get 8-way virtual SMP).
• Second, many of the HA features in large SMP systems can be provided by clustering or live migration capabilities in software.
• Third, having all that capacity in one box used to make it easier to reallocate resources between partitions -- but live migration across physical boxes makes that unnecessary as well.
• Lastly, some vendors have claimed that virtual environments built on big servers are easier to manage, since there are fewer physical endpoints to worry about. I think this is an older argument that dates back to when people purchased a Sun E10K to run a large number of websites. Ultimately, more automated management tools made it possible to run large numbers of scale-out servers at a similar cost.

Even among modular servers, there is some debate as to how big of a box you need. The recent release of the Intel Xeon 5500 allows you to manage a lot more memory with fewer physical CPUs. In order to provide the maximum amount of memory to their VMs, many companies purchased more processors than they needed -- simply so they could get enough RAM. Systems were still mostly memory bound, so with the release of the new Xeon 5500 that can address more DIMMS, we think that some firms will temporarily swing back towards systems with fewer CPUs. Plus, the CPUs have gotten much faster -- recent demonstrations by Intel are showing the new Xeon 5500-based servers running twice the workload of their prior models.

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's research.

Oracle Enhances VM Management With Virtual Iron Acquisition

The rumors are true. Oracle has finally announced that its intent to acquire Virtual Iron for its virtual server management capabilities.

It's a nice fit for Oracle, which has its own Xen-based virtualization platform called Oracle VM. Up until now, Virtual Iron has been selling its management tools on its own Xen-derived hypervisor. The net result is that Oracle gets dynamic resource management, power management, and better virtual server capabilities. And since Virtual Iron was built to manage Xen-based systems, the integration should be done by lunchtime on the day of the acquisition.

The acquisition brings up some larger questions, however, such as how Oracle will integrate Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Virtual Iron Sun's xVM Server and xVM Ops Center. Now that it will supply hardware and virtualization platforms, Oracle will need to build out a stronger system management and automation portfolio.

Today Oracle's virtualization tools don't have much traction in the market when compared with VMware or Microsoft. Prior to the acquisition of Sun, I would have said it was unlikely Oracle would become a general purpose virtualization platform, with a few die-hard Oracle customers using it for their Oracle apps. Combining three Xen contenders may position Oracle as the strongest Xen player, to the detriment of Citrix. Now, it seems more likely that Oracle can become a true platform vendor -- especially if it uses virtual appliances to distribute its products. We think virtual appliances make it easier to consume operating environments that you aren't accustomed to managing. You don't have to be a Linux expert to boot a VM with a preconfigured Linux OS and Oracle running on it. If done properly with automatic updates and a web interface, you would never even have to know what was running underneath.

More information can be found on Oracle's web site: http://www.oracle.com/virtualiron/index.html

By James Staten and Galen Schreck

Check out James' research and Galen's research.

VMware Wants To Be Your Network Operating System Of Choice

Whenever a company changes the name of their major product you often have to wonder what level of change they are trying to signal. In the case of VMware which changed ESX to vSphere yesterday, the signal is one of intent. They could have called it vWorldDomination but that might have been a bit too caustic. So instead they chose a global metaphor. Despite the subtlety, make no mistake, this version is a direct affront to how we have traditionally run our data centers with traditional operating systems and element-centric system management tools.

They made their case initially at VMWorld EMEA when they declared that a new “operating system” is needed in the virtualized data center and that the old model no longer applies. They called it Cloud OS but didn’t deliver on this vision. vSphere is the first step towards this new model in that it significantly shifts the focus from simply virtualizing workloads to managing and automating pools of VMs and shows how management at the virtual infrastructure layer can address data center efficiency in ways other layers can’t. It also moves the VM world closer to being able to manage business services that span VMs (although other tools like HP Operations Orchestrator and BMC BladeLogic still do this better) and track and diagnose their performance with AppSpeed, previously BeeHive, (although not as well as Hyperic).

Probably the biggest improvement in vSphere is its performance and scalability. There are a number of improvements to the maximum supported RAM and CPU configurations, as well as far better I/O throughput, and overall efficiency. In short, VMware can now claim that they can virtualize any application, no matter how performance hungry it is. Plus, VMware partners like Intel and Cisco have announced complimentary enhancements to address a variety of performance and ease of configuration issues.

Some of the key capabilities that enterprise customers should strongly consider include:

• vCenter Host Profiles -- Capture all the configuration details of a deployed virtual machine or collection of VMs and create a golden master that will enforce these configuration parameters when a service is reinstantiated, moved or duplicated.
• Thin provisioning with vStore -- Quick, what’s your storage to VM ratio today? What if you could cut this down by 90%? How many of your VMs share the same OS and middleware stack (or same applications). And your storing how many copies of that exact same software? 'Nuff said. While many enterprises take advantage of array-based thin provisioning to get some of these same benefits, vStore provides these vendors with an API to optimize thin provisioning for a vSphere environment.
• vShield Zones -- Distributed Resource Scheduling is a key technology for creating pools of resources and allowing VMs to automatically optimize their use of these resources. But managing a big homogeneous pool lets you set policies per app but not across groups of apps. Zones lets you create sub-pools for implementing these types of policies.
• vCloud -- while this is still mostly a future, VMware now has named a collection of hosting companies who plan to deploy VMware-based cloud computing in their data centers which will allow you to more easily take advantage of Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. The big gain they bring: Your vSphere and theirs are compatible and your existing vCenter-centric tools allow aggregation of your virtual pool and their clouds.
• Fault tolerance -- for applications that require zero downtime, VMware now offers a fault tolerant capability that can eliminate the need for specialized hardware or additional clustering technologies. The fault tolerance feature replicates your VM’s state to a shadow VM on separate hardware in the same data center. If the primary machine should fail, the shadow VM picks up with no disruption to users.

But before you can really take advantage of these enhancements, enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals need to adopt more general best practices with their VMware environments such as booting VMs from network storage, activating DRS and getting comfortable with basic policies, taking greater advantage of VM templates and virtual appliances, leveraging VMware HA for recovery, and backing up with tools that leverage VMware’s backup APIs. You can’t move to a more efficiency future without preparing your environment for it.

By James Staten and Galen Schreck

Check out James' research and Galen's research.

Cisco's Big Blade Server Bet

After months of rumors, Cisco officially entered the server business this morning with a modular system it calls the "Unified Computing System" (UCS). This blade server system goes one step beyond its predecessors by starting from a unified network foundation on ten gigabit per second Ethernet (10 GbE) that delivers a true wire-once architecture. We believe this is the next step in blade server technology as it collapses a lot of components in these systems -- unified network, direct path I/O from the VM through to the chip, to the network, and unique system optimization for virtual workloads.

However, no one is clamoring for another server vendor, so despite the strong showing of partners at this launch, Cisco will have to win over enterprise server buyers who up to this point have had no relationship with the company. We think UCS will succeed mostly in green field deployments inside of companies who have a strong strategic partnership with Cisco. As they realize the gains promised, others will start to take them seriously.

As Cisco has affected the telephony market with its VoIP push, so too could they have the same affect on the server market over time, but it would be a mistake to discount HP and IBM who see this same vision and arguably are better positioned to take their strategic partner enterprise clients there.

By James Staten and Galen Schreck

Check out James' research and Galen's research.

Emerson and Schneider get ready to compete in facility management software

The IT industry has made huge strides in software for change & configuration management, business service management, and IT process automation. Yet your data center facilities are probably living in the dark ages. For years, IT has been mapping out business services and mapping the underlying applications to the infrastructure it depends on. But the details never seem to go any further than the server level. I’m fairly certain that no one can tell you the racks, power circuits, or generators that a particular application depends on. And you can forget about managing applications’ power consumption – there’s no control past the UPS or PDU level.

The recent acquisition of Aperture by Emerson is noteworthy because it shows that the power and cooling giants are finally stirring in their lairs. Likewise, Emerson’s competitor Schneider Electric (through the better-known APC) has been building its own software portfolio focused on data center management for some time. Until recently, power and cooling vendors have been focused their limited software offerings on controlling their own infrastructure. But that’s changing -- now they’re shipping tools that can tell you the best location for that next rack of servers, or if you’ve already over-committed your physical infrastructure. There’s little competition from systems vendors like IBM and HP today, but it remains to be seen if Emerson and Schneider’s will become middleware providers or a direct competitors.

Today’s management tools from Emerson and Schneider provide good visibility and automation of the physical world within your data center, but application-to-circuit visibility is still a few years away. It will take that long to forge the kind of standards and integration that would let Tivoli or OpenView power down parts of the data center or redistribute critical apps in a failure scenario. Coupled with healthy competition and innovation, we think that industry consortiums like The Green Grid will significantly speed up the integration process by fostering early standards. We hope – it took almost eight years for the data center automation market to progress from startups like Opsware into (mostly) integrated management suites.

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's Research.

Oracle Supports Virtualization On X86 Systems With Its Own Xen-Based Hypervisor

There’s been some interesting news from Oracle today — they have announced that they will support virtualization of a long list of ten or so Oracle applications on their own flavor of the Xen hypervisor, which they dubbed Oracle VM. In addition to applications like Oracle Database, Application Server, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel CRM, customers can run other non-Oracle apps on Oracle VM as well. You’ll be able to download it for free on the 14^th, though you must pay for support ($499 per year per 2-CPU system, or $999 per year for a system with unlimited CPUs). The details of the announcement can be had on Oracle’s web site.

I’m somewhat conflicted, since customers will be happy that Oracle will officially support virtualization on x86 platforms — yet they’ve just created another flavor of Xen. According to Oracle, this was necessary to integrate with Oracle management tools and fix various bugs. I understand the need for Oracle to “own” the hypervisor it has committed to support, though it seems unlikely that another offshoot of Xen will be popular for much besides running Oracle products. Consider that Oracle also offers its own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, called Oracle Enterprise Linux, clustered file system, storage, and system management tools — it’s evident that Oracle is destined to be its own self-contained IT infrastructure.

We will have to come to terms with managing different pools of virtualized resources under the control of different tools like Sun xVM (a Xen variant), Citrix (XenSource), Oracle (another Xen variant), not to mention VMware — who runs the largest number of x86 virtual machines today. Soon Microsoft will enter the fray with Viridian, which has officially been renamed Hyper-V, as well as enhancements to MS System Center for managing both Hyper-V and VMware. Whether they admit it or not, each of these vendors is readying tools to manage competing virtualization stacks — not to mention a host of management software providers like Symantec, IBM, CA, and HP. Management is where you should focus your standardization efforts — figure out which consoles you need to run your multiple virtualized environments.

By Galen Schreck

Check out Galen's Research.