virtualization.info Editors

The first group met in Dallas in August, two more in Boston and Ottawa-Montreal have met in September, and over the next few weeks there are kickoff meetings in Calgary, Silver Spring MD, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia and Kansas City, MO.

The groups are meant to share best practices and provide a forum for new ideas and product optimization. VMware contributes product information, news and technical input, as requested by each group. And sometimes, for the kickoff meetings, lunch!

Michael Williams of Occidental Petroleum and Percy Gonzales of Mary Kay started the first North American VMUG in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Williams is a senior systems engineer and has worked with VMware for more than four years, since the release of Workstation 2.0. Gonzales began working with VMware during four years at Microsoft as a Lab Manager and Test Engineer for ISA server MSMQ Embedded NT and IVR.

Their reasons for starting the DFWVMUG revolve around communication and collaboration. Williams, who recruited his friend Percy to work with him on the project, felt that getting big companies who are users of VMware to speak with a single voice could help get software vendors to support their applications running on virtual servers. Gonzales hopes to get more documentation for the many ways of using VMware, and to encourage collaboration among the VMUG network members.

Both Williams and Gonzales speak highly of VMware’s support of their group and its goals. “Their participation is going to be strictly whatever we want them to do. This isn’t going to be a marketing thing,” Williams says. They are both impressed with how VMware has provided resources, even at the developer level, to address their questions.

More VMUGs will be starting up. Look for groups in Atlanta, Denver and NY/NJ soon. VMware also wants to help groups start in the following areas:

Northern CA
NC/SC
Florida
NorthWest (WA, OR)
Ohio/Western PA
South (GA, AL, TN, AK, MS, LA)
Midwest
MN/North Central
Toronto
EMEA
APAC

If you’d like to start a group in one of these areas, or in one not listed, visit www.vmware.com/vcommunity/usergroups for more information.

And that is what Dell did this week for the Oracle 10g database running on Windows and for the ESX Server virtual partitioning software from the VMware subsidiary of disk array maker EMC Corp.

On the Oracle front, Dell has been able to negotiate an exclusive prebundling agreement for the entry Oracle 10g Standard Edition One implementation of Oracle’s latest relational database. 10g Standard Edition One is the relatively inexpensive variant of the 10g database that runs on uniprocessor or two-way servers and which costs $4,995 per processor. (Oracle 10g Standard Edition, which runs on four-way servers, and Enterprise Edition, which runs on larger machines, cost $15,000 and $40,000 per processor, respectively.)

The bundling agreement is part of a broader partnership that Oracle and Dell initiated two years ago as they decided that it was better to cluster two-way and four-way servers than try to sell big SMP boxes. Because Dell doesn’t have big SMP boxes–and has no intention of creating them now that database clustering technologies have matured–this strategy makes sense and is a necessity for Dell. But while Oracle talks about “scale out” architectures, it still gets the bulk of its sales and profits on big “scale up” SMP machines, and it is very eager to sell Enterprise Edition on such machines. Make no mistake about that. Oracle can and does sell on both sides of that street.

Under the deal the two companies announced yesterday, Dell will begin bundling Oracle 10g Standard Edition One on its PowerEdge 2850 rack-mounted servers immediately and will extend the bundling to the 2800 tower servers starting in the fourth quarter. These Dell servers use Intel’s 64-bit Xeon chips (with current speeds of up to 3.6GHz) and support up to 8GB of main memory each. The odds favor Dell offering a similar deal on 10g Standard Edition and the future “Potomac” 64-bit Xeon MPs when they become available early next year. The entry server bundles from Dell will also include the company’s PowerVault 220S external SCSI disk arrays. The servers will run Microsoft Corp’s Windows Server 2003 operating system. This offering is an alternative to the Oracle bundles on PowerEdge servers that Dell offers on Red Hat Inc’s Linux platform.

Dell also announced yesterday that it would be pushing VMware’s ESX Server virtualization product on its PowerEdge 1850 (1U) and 2850 (2U) Xeon-64 servers. While Dell has had a partnership with VMware for quite some time to sell its GSX Server and ESX Server, this offering goes a little bit further in that Dell is selling pretested systems (but not preconfigured) that have been certified to run specific VMware virtualization software and offering front-line technical support for the whole shebang. Dell is only offering ESX Server as part of this deal, which is the low-level virtualization software from VMware that has the best isolation between virtual machines, in that it runs on the bare metal server, not within another operating system that could, in theory, fail and take down all of the virtual machines. Dell is selling ESX Server 2.1.2, which has been tweaked to support the 64-bit “Nocona” Xeon processors, as well as VMware’s Virtual Center Management Server. Dell is also supporting the CX300 and CX500 SAN arrays that it makes in conjunction with EMC. Dell pricing for ESX Server starts at $4,688 for these two PowerEdge servers, including Dell support, which is backed by VMware’s Platinum support. Dell is also supporting the Virtual SMP features of ESX Server (which allow a single virtual machine to span across two physical processors) and VMotion technology, which allows the workload running inside one virtual machine on one physical machine to be transported across the network to another partition on another machine. This offer is available in the United States and Europe.

Feeling pressure from both Apple and G5 customers, Microsoft this summer cut several key enhancements from its Virtual PC 7.0 Windows emulation software in order to deliver a G5 compatible solution without further delays.

One of the features reportedly shelved until a future release was native graphics card support. But precisely what is delaying this feature remains a mystery to even some members of the Virtual PC team, as they are not the ones responsible for the implementation.

According to sources, Virtual PC’s native graphics card support is being handled exclusively by Microsoft’s Xbox team. Though not expected for several months, the feature will reportedly demand a graphics card that meets the same level of graphics sophistication required for Apple’s Core Image and Video technology.

For Macintosh systems that sport a compatible ATI graphics card, future versions of Virtual PC will emulate an original Radeon with up to 32MB of virtual video memory. Likewise, for Macs equipped with a compliant Nvidia graphics card, sources said that the emulated chipset will be a Geforce 3 with up to 32MB of virtual video memory.

The performance and speed of Virtual PC’s emulated graphics will depend on the speed of the host machine’s graphics and the number of available processors, sources added.

To accelerate adoption of the HP BladeSystem, HP will provide installation and start-up services of blade management software for a low price of just $1,600 per engagement.

HP’s modular approach to utility computing makes it easier for customers in volume markets to acquire and integrate the capabilities of the HP Utility Data Center into existing environments and deliver information technology (IT) as a service. In addition to the HP BladeSystem, the following modular utility computing offerings are available from HP:

– HP Virtual Server Environment — automatically grows and shrinks vertical, scale-up resources in real time according to changing business priorities;

– HP OpenView Change and Configuration management solutions automate the change and configuration of IT resources to reduce operational costs of data center environments; and

– HP Utility Services delivers pay-as-you-go computing through HP Managed Services.

Bausch & Lomb deploys the HP BladeSystem

Bausch & Lomb has selected HP BladeSystem servers to bring greater value and overall efficiencies to its IT infrastructure.

“At Bausch & Lomb, we use HP blade servers to help us streamline our datacenter to better synchronize IT with evolving business needs,” said David Della Vedova, vice president IT, Global Technology Services, Bausch & Lomb. “As a result, we improved efficiency, customer responsiveness and reduced datacenter costs by dramatically reducing deployment and ongoing management expenses. We chose HP, a pioneer in the blade server industry, because of its ability to offer a complete blade solution including hardware, software, services and virtualization capabilities.”

Based on industry standards, integrated blade systems can deliver lower infrastructure costs — often 25 percent less expensive overall than comparable traditional rack-mount infrastructures and, with automated control, lower annual support costs — more than doubling the number of devices that can be managed with the same amount of staff. The HP BladeSystem is designed to build on this value by offering overall network management and virtualization through resource utilization and services, changing how customers look at a blade ecosystem.

“HP looks forward to extending the value of our BladeSystem family of solutions together with partners to meet the needs of enterprise and small and medium business customers. In fact, by 2008, we expect that 50 percent of HP’s scale-out architecture business will be based on the HP BladeSystem,” said Rick Becker, vice president and general manager, BladeSystem Division, HP. “HP’s new, modular approach to delivering utility-like capabilities with the HP BladeSystem will put customers on a fast track to becoming an Adaptive Enterprise.”

New management software tools, including a single, dynamic hub for blades

At the center of any infrastructure, companies need to implement strong management and virtualization tools to allow them to align IT resources with business needs. HP has integrated Utility Data Center capabilities into the HP BladeSystem management suite of tools, which is designed to manage, control and virtualize an existing IT infrastructure as one system from a single remote console in order to maximize utilization and automate complex, manual tasks.

Key new management software tools, integrated with HP OpenView technology, can be applied to existing or new blade infrastructures:

– HP Systems Insight Manager 4.2 (SIM) — now optimized to manage the complete HP BladeSystem environment, SIM 4.2 is the single hub of control through one console for all system components and access to all tools for complete lifecycle management. SIM 4.2 is the first version of SIM to leverage plug-ins including HP OpenView technology, providing customers with a single, standards-based tool that enables client, storage, network and power management, server deployment, in addition to performance and workload management.

– HP Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack — integrated with SIM 4.2, the pack provides management, control and a unified view of virtual machines and associated host server resources, including virtual machine products from Microsoft and VMware.

– HP Essentials Automation Controller Pack — coordinates the actions of other HP management tools to enable simplified and automated event-based policy and tasks across the blade infrastructures including provisioning of compute nodes, operating systems, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), load balancers and storage LUNs.

– HP Essentials Patch and Vulnerability Pack — integrated into SIM 4.2 and utilizing HP OpenView Radia, the pack enables known software vulnerabilities to be automatically identified across the HP BladeSystem and permanently fixed using HP patch management technology.

– Other upcoming tools include the HP Essentials Intelligent Networking Pack, which detects and analyzes network bottlenecks; HP Essentials Insight Lights-Out 1.62, a built-in management processor for quick and easy setup of blade servers and enclosures; and power governing technology for Intel(R) Xeon(TM)-based blade servers that provides dynamic changes in processor frequency and voltage.

New services and financing to help implement the Adaptive Enterprise

Two new types of services are also now available, including defined installation and startup services as well as statement of work services. The new installation services provide detailed knowledge transfer in HP SIM fundamentals and help get HP BladeSystem management up and running in a pilot environment in a single day at $1,600 per session. The new statement of work services, charged at an hourly rate, are designed to deploy the HP BladeSystem management tools in a production environment over multiple days. Customers are assigned a service delivery specialist and provided with detailed documentation.

Forrester says firms shouldn’t get suckered into a feature function or price shootout – the real contest here is to see which vendor’s product will integrate better with data center automation solutions that slash the costs of managing lots of OSes, whether they are virtual or physical.
Microsoft has shipped Virtual Server 2005, which lets firms consolidate multiple server instances–often called virtual machines (VMs)–on one server. Making servers virtual slashes hardware costs, eases administration tasks, and lets firms relocate servers without compatibility issues. Virtual Server also finally adds a prominent product to the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), Microsoft’s take on next generation data architecture, which Forrester calls Organic IT.

To get the final details on the launch of Virtual Server, Forrester spoke with Microsoft Group Product Manager Eric Berg. In order to compete with VMware’s market-leading server virtualization products, Virtual Server will cost less, be integrated with Microsoft management tools, and be the only Microsoft-supported virtualization product–but it won’t officially support VMs other than Windows, such as Linux.

The EMC subsidiary plans to announce on Monday a test version of Assured Computing Environment, which lets an outside computer run a second instance of Windows that can be locked down to prevent unauthorized copying or network access. ACE will be shipped by the end of the year, said Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at VMware.

Without something like ACE, a company would have to supply a remote user or contractor with an entirely separate computer, Mullany said.

“It allows you to completely control the user environment at a very fundamental level,” he said.

To keep proprietary information from spreading to computers outside a company, ACE can be configured to block access to USB memory devices, floppy drives, printers or other devices that could be used to save or print information stored on corporate networks. In addition, it enables outsiders use a company’s approved software collection, making it harder for foreign computers to infect corporate networks with viruses or other dangerous software.

The product serves a useful niche, Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said. “They’re essentially repurposing VMware workstation technology for a different audience and use. But VMware’s ambitions seem modest here. They’re not making…claims of new computing paradigms.”

VMware competes chiefly with Microsoft, whose Virtual Server product also lets computers run several operating systems at the same time through the use of software called virtual machines. VMware has been expanding to higher-level software such as VMotion, which lets customers move a running virtual machine from one physical computer to another.

ACE can be set to stop working at a specific time–for example, when a contractor’s job is scheduled to be finished so no further access to a company’s network will be required.

The software is expected to cost about $100 per computer when it ships by the end of the year. It will first be available for Windows computers, with Linux support to follow.

An administration package called ACE Manager, used to configure how ACE PCs will work, will cost more, Mullany said.

The software, which should ship by 1 October, is Microsoft’s response to clear server partitioning leader VMware – a unit of EMC. However, this arrives four years behind VMware, two years behind target and without most of the high-end features – most notably support for Linux – now common in VMware’s ESX Server product. But Microsoft can offer customers something VMware can’t, and that’s Microsoft support for software running on a virtual machine or partition and a cheap price.

Microsoft has turned away customers looking for partitioning help once they admit to running Windows on a spliced server via VMware. It’s not a practice Microsoft is terribly public about, but it is well-known policy. To offset this, VMware has teamed up with big boys such as IBM, HP and Dell to help out customers and take care of Windows support issues.

VMware’s strong alliances have vaulted it to a unique state in the market for servers based on Intel and AMD processors. The large server OEMs have all agreed to resell VMware’s products instead of building partitioning tools of their own. For IBM and HP, in particular, this is a major role reversal compared to their Unix server strategies, where each vendor writes its own complex partitioning code.

This shouldn’t be surprising since the x86 server market enjoys far more standardization than the RISC and Itanium market. The whole idea is to keep software costs as low as possible, since the x86 space is largely a commodity market.

The downside of VMware, and software like it, is that it’s years behind similar Unix tools. IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems have all released fairly amazing stuff for running multiple workloads on a single server and tweaking the processing power, bandwidth and storage for each partition. In many cases, this software is tied into the vendors’ larger utility computing and capacity pricing models. This brings customers closer and closer to the promised virtualization orgasm where servers and software manage themselves.

VMware’s software is well-respected but not on the level of these Unix tools. Both ESX Server and GSX Server are primarily used for software development and testing. Customers can see how well software packages work on different versions of an operating system and test out patches. They can do all of this on a single server instead of spending loads of cash test systems. There are production deployments but not an overwhelming number of them.

Microsoft comes in lower on the totem pole. It acquired a product from Connectix, once meant to ship in 2002, and then spent 18 months retooling the code. The original Connectix code was based on the company’s Virtual PC software for running multiple OSes on the same desktop, and one can only hope Microsoft moved well away from this low-end software with its server product. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case as Microsoft still requires a host operating system to run Virtual Server, while VMware’s ESX server uses its own operating system – a feature which makes many of the more complex partitioning functions possible.

In addition, Microsoft only supports one extra OS per processor, while VMware can support up to eight partitions per processor. VMware has tools for clustering virtual machines, adjusting processing power for different software workloads and disaster recovery technology. Microsoft is still working to catch up in all these areas.

Microsoft’s Virtual Server can run Windows, Linux, OS/2 and just about any other x86 operating system, but it won’t support non-Windows OSes. In a market based on the premise of helping customers consolidate their products, this is a big drawback. Microsoft’s lack of support seems like a political decision – and one for which customers have every right to complain.

– Cleaning house
To Microsoft’s credit, it’s not pricing Virtual Server as if it were a real competitor to VMware. At $499 for the standard edition (up to 4 processors) and $999 for the enterprise edition (up to 32 processors), Virtual Server comes in more as a handy tool than a consolidation miracle. Customers can get rid of some old servers running ancient Windows apps and bring the software over to a single, powerful new server. It’s really more for cleaning house than total data center reconstruction – something companies such as Qualcomm have done with VMware.

VMware’s high-end ESX Server product comes in around $4,000 for 2 CPU systems, $7,000 for 4 CPU systems and $15,000 for 8 CPU systems. GSX Server starts close to $2,000 for a 2 CPU box.

So, if you have some nagging applications hanging around that currently demand their own server, Microsoft’s product might be the right choice for you. Just pop the suckers onto a single box and work with Microsoft to keep crashes at a minimum. This should be a fairly common scenario for mostly Microsoft shops, especially with Redmond providing support.

If, however, data center consolidation is your game, then VMware should probably be your partitioning vendor of choice. Customers can run more virtual machines, use more management tools and put both Windows and Linux on the same box. It will cost you more, but the quality is worth the price.

Over time, customers can expect virtual machine technology to improve considerably. Intel, for example, is currently working on its Silvervale partitioning technology. This will handle many of the calls typically done by software in hardware and improve the performance of both VMware and Microsoft’s code.