VIRTUAL MACHINES

MICHAEL VIZARD writes

Over the past several years two distinct management cultures have grown up inside the IT organization. The first is the traditional IT organization’s team of people dedicated to the managing on the physical infrastructure. The second group is a raft of highly trained IT professionals focused on virtual machines.

At this point a majority of IT managers are unaware of the potential benefits of virtualization. I have to imagine that it is still quite difficult to make the case, let alone effectively deploy and integrate virtualization inside most business environment.

Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization, and that task will most likely fall on his shoulders. In Allison’s perfect world, however, he’d leave that to the desktop experts. But virtualization has never been a perfect world, and it’s even less so now that companies are implementing multiple vendors’ virtualization software.

As a network engineer with the Florida healthcare organization Health First, Allison is charged with managing the virtual server infrastructure, and he’d like to keep it that way. He’s all for desktop virtualization; it’s just that he’d much prefer the traditional keepers of the end-user machines oversee the project, thank you very much.

It is clear that VMware is facing significant challenges from at least four different sectors. Citrix, Microsoft, the Xen community and Red Hat are all hoping to push the VMware off of the throne and assume the title of “King of Virtual Machine Technology.” The stiff challenge is causing the hypervisor itself to become acommodity and, as my colleague Greg Zwackman pointed out in a recent report “Virtualization Software: Market Sizing and and Forecasts Overview,” suppliers will be forced to look to other segments of the overall market for virtualization technology for increased revenues and profits.VMware today holds the lions share of the overall market for virtualization technology including products for application virtualization, desktop virtualization, server virtualization, management of virtualized environments and security for virtualized environments. It counts on the help of partners, such as Cisco and EMC, for help in the areas of network virtualization and storage virtualization. It has a broad ecosystem and strong marketing.

Citrix Systems Tuesday announced a flexible approach to desktop virtualization that integrates formerly disparate options into one XenDesktop management console.

Desktop virtualization has been slow to take off due to its complexities and the inherent possibility of generating dissatisfaction among hundreds or thousands of end users if the user experience deteriorates in a virtualized environment. Citrix said that with its XenDesktop 4, however, IT managers will be able to find the option that is right for each set of end users, despite widely varying needs.”2010 will be a watershed year for desktop virtualization, ushering in a new era that will revolutionize the way we work,” Mark Templeton, president and CEO, predicted in the announcement of XenDesktop 4. In effect, Citrix is attempting to parlay its 20-year history of distributing virtualized applications to what is now 100 million end users via XenApp, formerly known as Citrix Presentation Server. Using XenApp to virtualize core Windows applications centrally and allowing users to plug into application services off a central server remains one option in Citrix XenDesktop.

During the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 extravaganza taking place this week in San Francisco, Oracle made its latest server virtualization move by announcing the release of Oracle VM 2.2. With this product, the company claims its customers will be able to accelerate deployment and simplify management of enterprise applications.

Everyone likes to try new and shiny technology toys like the Windows 7 beta, but when the price is having to replace your existing operating system, that’s too much for most people. That’s when being able to use a virtualization program can come in darn handy.

To test out how well Windows 7 works on a virtualized system, I decided to use Sun’s VirtualBox software.

Sun has worked hard to bring features seen in VMware and Citrix’s hypervisors into its VirtualBox and hopes to attract a following based upon what appears to be a free hypervisor. Version 3 of VirtualBox offers capabilities that make it quite competitive with the others.

There are features designed to please just about everyone - folks thinking about server virtualization projects, folks thinking about desktop virtualization projects and even those needed high performance graphics. There’s a bit of a problem lurking in this announcement as well.

The pricing for Sun’s Support services, in my view, is the proverbial fly in the ointment. Rather than pricing support by the number of processors/cores or the number of systems, Sun has chosen an approach that adds up to a “VirtualBox tax” per user - $30 per user to be exact. While this seems a small amount at first glance, it may cost organizations more than they think. The key definition that holds a clue to the real cost of using this technology is what, exactly, is a user?

Once strictly the domain of software developers and QA engineers, personal and small-businessvirtualizationproducts are now becoming an attractive solution for entry-level systems consolidation and foreign OS compatibility applications. These solutions run on host operating systems which do not require the overhead or usual high entry cost of professional hypervisor-based solutions, such as VMWare ESX Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Oracle VM and Sun xVM Server, all of which with the exception of the first two are based on the open source Xen hypervisor.

The market leader in this SMB/Personal virtualization space has traditionally been VMWare, which released the very first commercial x86 desktop virtualization product, Workstation 1.0, in 1999. Version 6 of Workstation, which features a portable virtualization “engine” that is used in all of VMWare’s host-based virtualization products, was released in late 2007, followed soon VMWare Fusion, a Macintosh version of Workstation. In 2006 VMWare released VMWare Player, a runtime distributable version which permitted any user on a Windows or Linux platform to run self-contained “virtual appliances” created in VMWare GSX Server, VMWare Workstation, orESX Server. In 2006 VMWare also released Server 1.0 , a free version of its legacy VMWare GSX Server product, which used to be sold for approximately $1000 a copy.

With little fanfare, Sun Microsystems released version 3.0 of xVM VirtualBox, the Open Source and multi-platform desktop virtualization tool for Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac. The new release represents a culmination of hundreds of bugfixes and significant performance enhancements, including the ability for the product to permit guest OSes to use up to 32 virtual CPUs each. Under previous versions of the product, only one CPU core per guest OS was permitted.