Year: 2008

On July 25 VMware releases the RTM of its new Powershell-powered toolkit for VirtualCenter, in beta since March.

The words that VMware spent to describe it are remarkable:

I think I’ve made it clear that I believe the VI Toolkit (for Windows) is one of the most powerful tools VMware has ever made for VI admins. It’s designed at just the right level of abstraction that lets a VI admin carry out commands with a very natural syntax — the commands and objects you want are just right there. It’s built on a technology (PowerShell) that is a damn powerful scripting language that lets you pipe objects between scripts, er, cmdlets…

and give a huge credit to Microsoft, which invented the Powershell language and built its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) on top of it.

Microsoft SCVMM and VMware VirtualCenter are competing products but they now share the same scripting language: customers may wonder if the wonderful things that Powershell allows to do on VirtualCenter can be replicated on SCVMM.

VMware is further encouraging such kind of questions by launching an interesting contest.
The company will award three submitted scripts that can match three simple criteria:

• Time saved, demonstrate how your script solves a real problem and reduces administration effort and time
• Usefulness of script – how broadly applicable is your script to other VI administrators?
• Simplicity, elegance of script

We wonder if anybody can win the contest with a script that works both on VirtualCenter and on SCVMM.

Download the VI Toolkit 1.0 for Windows here.

As MCPmag.com revealed in June, Microsoft is preparing its first certification exam for the new Hyper-V 1.0: 70-652 – Technical Specialist (TS): Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring.

The company plans to release the exam in August and already published the detailed list of exam subjects (edited to simplify the reading):

Installing Hyper-V (14%)

• Select and configure hardware to meet Hyper-V prerequisites (evaluate the existing environment, disk/LUN, memory requirements, correct CPU/BIOS, networking/NIC, etc.)
• Configure Windows Server 2008 for Hyper-V (identify requirements, deploy Hyper-V with SCVMM), Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool, install on Full, install on Core, etc.)
• Configure Hyper-V to be highly available (failover clustering, disk structure, network, etc.)

Configuring and Optimizing Hyper-V (20%)

• Manage and optimize the Hyper-V server (VHD location, snapshot location, Systems Center, SCVMM, Authorization Manager, release key, performance monitoring of Windows 2008,etc.)
• Configure virtual networking (Virtual Network Manager tool, SCVMM, virtual switches, VLAN tagging, external/private/internal switches, etc.)
• Configure remote administration (install Hyper-V manager on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista; WMI, WinRM, firewall settings, RDP, etc.)

Deploying Virtual Machines (30%)

• Migrate a computer to Hyper-V (from Virtual Server 2005, from Acronis, from Virtual PC, from Hyper-V, Intel to AMD virtual machine state, by using SCVMM 2008 with P2V and V2V, Integration Services/Virtual Machine additions, Assessment and Planning tool. etc.)
• Create or clone a virtual machine (prepare guest operating system for sysprep, differencing disks, copying VHDs, SCVMM 2008, PXE Boot , manage the Self Service portal, Windows Deployment Services, etc.)
• Create a virtual disk (pass-through disks, fixed vs. dynamic, differencing disks, IDE vs SCSI, Virtual Hard Disk Wizard. etc.)
• Manage templates, profiles, and the image library by using SCVMM 2008 (ISOs, VHDs, deployment from library, etc.)

Managing and Monitoring Virtual Machines (36%)

• Monitor and optimize virtual machines (Tool: Reliability and performance monitor, Tool: SCVMM, processor, optimize memory, network, disks, etc.)
• Manage virtual machine settings (DVD/ISO, NIC, Integration Services, state of virtual machines, Hypercall adapter availability requirements, reboot/start options, BIOS, memory, Processor, etc.)
• Manage snapshots and backups (backups of a VM by using VSS Data Protection Manager (DPM), backup within a virtual machine, snapshots. etc.)
• Configure a virtual machine for high availability (quick migration, storage redundancy, perform a manual failover, live migration if available, networking redundancy, etc.)

As part of the preparation material Microsoft also made available two free online courses (each one two hours long):

• Clinic 5935: Introducing Server Virtualization in Windows Server 2008
• Clinic 6536: Implementing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 

After appointing a new CEO, Sameer Dholakia, in October 2007, the startup VMLogix continues its expansion and hires other two key executives.

The first, Mark Pileski, is one of the people behind the success of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February):

VMLogix, Inc., a leading provider of virtual lab automation solutions that help software companies and IT organizations leverage virtualization to consolidate lab infrastructure and automate build and test processes, today announced that Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa have joined the company as vice president of marketing and vice president of worldwide sales, respectively.

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Having spent more than 10 years helping grow software companies, Pileski brings a wealth of marketing experience to VMLogix. He was most recently director of corporate marketing for Novell, which he joined with the acquisition of PlateSpin. Pileski joined PlateSpin in January 2005 as one of the founding members of the PlateSpin marketing team and built an award-winning group which received an International Business Award for Best Marketing Organization in 2007.

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As vice president of worldwide sales at VMLogix, Yanagawa will be responsible for leading direct and indirect sales efforts. For the past two years, she has acted as an executive advisor for several startup and venture capital projects focused on providing market assessment and defining sales strategies. Prior to this role, Yanagawa was vice president of inside sales for the EMC Software Division where she successfully rebuilt and developed an organization of more than 170 sales people dedicated to prospecting, qualifying, closing, and renewing opportunities representing over $500 million in annual revenue…

The US startup VKernel released its second product, the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzed 1.0, just in April 2008 and it’s already completing the second release.

DABCC.com published an exclusive video of the new version, where the company’s CEO Alex Bakman shows some of the new features coming:

• Detailed disk IO statistics
• Enhanced disk bottlenecks analysis
• More detailed CPU Metrics
• Enhanced UI and scalability

Watch the video here.

Today VMware hit another major step towards the hypervisor’s commoditization by releasing its bare-metal hypervisor ESX for free.
And this move, planned long time by the former CEO Diane Greene, is clearly a move to counter the raising menace of Microsoft and its new free hypervisor Hyper-V.

Now that both players are targeting the SMB market (while Citrix is fully busy challenging VMware in the Enterprise space), one interesting question to answer is: which product is better?

As the history tells us better doesn’t necessarily means with most features, as the product positioning involves the sales channel capability to win the customers, the total cost of ownership, the capability to scale up with the company, the hardware and software support for the ecosystem, etc.

While these factors are hard to measure, the TCO has a special appeal and no company cannot avoid the temptation to calculate the hidden costs of the competing offerings.

The first attempt comes from VMware, thanks to Mike DiPetrillo, the now popular Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department, that uses his personal blog to detail a pretty interesting analysis:

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Everyone out there has a different view on what the SMB space is made up of but pretty much everyone agrees that they have fewer than 50 servers and a minimal IT staff that’s mostly educated on Microsoft products. I know there are exceptions but I’m going for the larger group here.

With any of today’s virtualization solutions and a half way decent 2 socket system you should be able to get at least a 10:1 consolidation ratio and probably closer to 15:1.

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ESXi 3.5 is completely free. The Hyper-V role is completely free. The major difference is Hyper-V requires a Windows Server 2008 host to run and ESXi 3.5 does not. Most SMBs out there do not pay for Software Assurance (Microsoft’s upgrade program) for their server software. I don’t have any hard stats so if someone does please reply in the comments section. I’m just going off my experience of selling to this space for a very long time. This means that you have a lot of SMBs out there running Windows Server 2003 or even Windows Server 2000 or Windows NT. Since you need Windows Server 2008 in order to run Hyper-V this means you have to go out and pay for the cost of a Windows server license just to get Hyper-V.

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Let’s say you decide after adding the 3 hosts it would take for your 30 VM environment that you want to have some centralized management capabilities. In the Hyper-V world that means Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager. In the VMware world that means Virtual Center Server. Again, this is not a feature comparison article. Both solutions at their basics allow for the same things – create and manage a VM, manage a library, one pane of glass, etc.

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So, just to recap on the 3 host, centralized management solution – Microsoft SCVMM = $3,300 buying a la carte or $499 for the Workgroup Edition (we’ll use Workgroup for our final tally numbers); VMware VI Foundation = $2,995.

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It’s worth mentioning that when you buy VMware Foundation you get some nice advanced features in the bundle such as VMware Update Manager (patching of hosts and VMs) and VMware Consolidated Backup. If you wanted similar features for Hyper-V you would need to buy the Systems Center Systems Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) which costs $1,290 per host.

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Now we’re looking at the advanced features such as patch management and backup for our 3 host solution – Microsoft with SMSE = $4,260; VMware VI Foundation = $2,995.

…

DiPetrillo closes with a comparison table:

Some of the points in this analysis may be arguable.
For example the virtual infrastructure patching can be achieved through the great WSUS, a product that Microsoft releases totally free or charge.

Nonetheless this analysis highlights an important point: to perform a basic and critical feature like virtual machines backup, Microsoft today obliges the customers to buy Data Protection Manager (no matter if it’s included in the SMSE bundle).
This happens because NTBackup, which is included in every copy of Windows and it’s ready to do the much wanted live snapshot through the Volume Shadow Service (VSS), can’t run the job.
Microsoft had the opportunity to use NTBackup as a competitive advantage against VMware and didn’t use it.

As usual we’ll update the post with any relevant answer from Microsoft and others.

Update: While Microsoft still refrains from arguing this cost analysis, at least a couple of prominent figures in the virtualization world have something to say about it.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, changed the requirements to include high-availability (a much savvy choice) and extended the comparison to Citrix and Virtual Iron. He found out that Microsoft is significantly less expensive than VMware.

Massimo Re Ferrè, IT Architect at IBM, proceeded exactly in the same way, adding high-availabiliy as a mandatory requirement, and found out the same thing: Microsoft is less expensive than VMware.

As unveiled during the Q2 2008 earnings report, VMware today releases its flagship product, the bare-metal hypervisor ESX (formerly ESX Server), as a 100% free download (there’s no need to buy a support subscription).

This is the third virtualization platform that the company gives away at no cost: in December 2005 VMware released its first free product, Player, and in July 2006 the commercial solution known as GSX Server was released for free as Server.
At this point the only hardware virtualization platform that VMware sells is Workstation (we wonder for how much).

This version of the hypervisor shares a large part of the code with the ESX included in the so called VMware Infrastructure, which reaches today the Update 2 milestone, so we can safely say that today the company releases ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

Of course ESXi doesn’t include VirtualCenter, so the enhanced management capabilities that it offers (like VMotion, DRS, HA, etc.) are not offered free of charge as well.
Despite that the free edition still includes an endless and well-known list of features that make the product highly desirable for SMBs.

Last week virtualization.info revealed some exclusive details about the company strategy behind this move, like what happens to the customers that already purchased ESXi, the destiny of VMware Server or the limitations in building a VirtualCenter clone (or something better) for 3rd party entities.

Not all companies seems to be worried of such limitations: Ericom for example just announced that it’s able to setup a VDI environment with just ESXi and its PowerTerm WebConnect.

Download VMware ESXi free of charge here.

As expected VMware has released the Update 2 for ESX (build 103908) and VirtualCenter (104215).

This new version brings a number of important features including:

• Cross-processors VMotion (auto-configuration of AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel FlexMigration)
• Virtual machines live snapshot through Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) (only Windows 2003 and 2008 guest OSes)
• Virtual machines live cloning
• Virtual disks hot-extension (only for flat disks without snapshots in persistent mode)
• VMware HA support for individual virtual machines
• VirtualCenter alarms for physical servers health (single components supported)
• Manual computers addition in Guided Consolidation (by hostname or IP)
• Single Sign-On (SSO) on VirtualCenter client (capability to pass-through Windows authentication credentials, with support for smartcards and digital certificates)
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Sun Solaris 10 U5, Novell SLES 10 SP2 and Ubuntu 8.04 guest OSes
• Support for 8GB Fibre Channel HBAs
• Support for NFS and iSCSI over 10Gbit Ethernet
• Support for Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) (no more experimental)

It’s worth to note that the Remote CLI has been greatly revamped and now finally includes a wide range of commands.

Download a trial of VI 3.5 Update 2 here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Seven months from its previous release, Provision Networks finally ships the new version of its cross-platform VDI connection broker: Virtual Access Suite (VAS).

This 5.10 version is the first one to be released after the Quest acquisition occurred in November 2007 and brings a remarkable number of features. Among the others:

• Group-based dynamic provisioning
• Automated power management for virtual desktops (power off/on, suspend, standby, Wakeup-On LAN)
• Automated management for guest OS (log off, reset, restart, shutdown)
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0
• Support for Virtual Iron 4.3.x
• Support for PXE Boot and LiveCD Linux clients
• Support for SmartCard login
• Support for bi-directional audio (microphone redirection)

Shortly, Provision Networks should release an additional update to include another much wanted feature: the Multimedia Redirection, which seamlessly redirects multi-media content to the client CODEC for local playback.

The company published a live demo of the product which is worth to try.
A trial instead is available here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Three years ago two well-known influencers in the virtualization industry, Ron Oglesby (Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services at GlassHouse) and Scott Herold (Lead Architect of Virtualiztion at Quest), published a unique book for all the VMware professionals out there: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

Instead of replicating most of the contents available through (already very good) VMware documentation, these guys collected years of experience on real-world infrastructures, offering a precious collection of best practices and advices to design every aspect of a virtual data center with ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x.

Doing the same for the relatively new VMware Infrastructure 3.x requires some time, to master the products, learn the new rules, build a solid blueprint in designing with the new features and limitations in mind.

So, even if VMware Infrastructure 3 was released 2 years ago, Ron and Scott are back only now, with a new co-author, Mike Laverick (Independent Trainer and Consultant at RTFM Education), and a new book:

Actually the tome is made by two books, the Design Guide and the Operations Guide:

By the way: Scott Herold will be one of the premiere speakers presenting at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the virtualization.info’s independent conference.

We are almost ready to publish the agenda but here the abstract of his session:

Achieving Optimal Performance from your Virtual Infrastructure through Management and Automation

Server virtualization has brought significant efficiencies to IT operations, but at the cost of new challenges in monitoring the health of virtual machines, analyzing data, alerting staff of incidents and problems, and performing standard and special administrative tasks. These challenges are growing as virtualization takes an increasingly central role in IT, forcing administrators to invest more time and effort into ensuring the proper operation and health of the virtual environment. Join Scott Herold, Lead Architect at Vizioncore, who describes how the growing complexity and lack of resources necessitates changing the way IT operations are commonly performed. Herold offers insight to the tools and strategies that accelerate and automate IT activities to reduce the workload inherent in a virtualization strategy, while also enabling IT professionals to get ahead of the curve and begin a strategy to higher levels of operational maturity.

We are pretty sure that Scott will be more than glad to do some book signing at the end of his session (or while busy at the Quest/Provision Networks and Vizioncore booths during the event).

As most virtualization.info readers know we offer a unique resource called the Virtualization Industry Radar.
It lists all the companies in the Hardware, OS and Application Virtualization markets that we daily track on the website.

67 companies are currently there, and we invited all of them to our first independent conference: the Virtualization Congress 2008.

We are very proud today to announce that 23 of those companies promptly answered.

Our newest sponsors are Parallels and EMC as Platinum, Symantec as Gold, Magirus, CiRBA, Ceedo, InstallFree, CDG and Catbird as Silver.

With them we have since the early days: Quest/Provision Networks, Microsoft, ManageIQ, Citrix, VMware, HP, and Phoenix Technologies as Platinum, Marathon Technologies and Vizioncore as Gold, VMLogix, Veeam, Transitive, eG Innovations and IGEL as Silver.   

The details of all these companies are here.

We think that it’s an amazing number for a lot of reasons, but the best thing is that the number will continue to grow even more.
We can’t wait to announce the other major virtualization players that you’ll see on the Exhbitors’ Floor of the ExCeL Conference Centre in London, from the 15th to 16th of October.

We hope to see all of our readers there.