We’ve gotten some questions recently about what impact VMware’s decision to make ESXi free will have on the market.

The short answer is – not much.

First, we’re pleased to welcome VMware to the party. It’s taken them a long time to get here.

But it's important that customers look beyond the punch line to what they're actually getting. First, if you want support, you need to purchase an ESXi maintenance subscription -- reasonable enough. Next, if you want to manage ESXi using Virtual Center -- which is a must in my opinion for anything more than a single server, you need to purchase at least the Foundation Edition for $995.

And if you want advanced capabilities such as HA, it will cost you still more money.

Unfortunately for VMware's customers, although they're getting religion that the hypervisor should be free, their prices for basic virtual infrastructure are still in the stratosphere. I guess that's what they mean by cloud computing.

When considering a backup strategy for virtual infrastructure, organizations need to look at all options, and the pros and cons of each. I've recently seen some VMware papers that highlight VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) as an advantage over other backup approaches. Certainly VCB has advantages in VMware's environment, where VMFS makes disk-based snapshots irrelevant. But it's not clear that it's required for other solutions that don't put a proprietary clustered file system between the virtual machine and storage.

VCB leverages VMFS snapshots to provide point-in-time images of the disk. The VCB backup proxy mounts these snapshots and performs a backup without impacting the CPU, network or disk resources of the source server. On the downside, VCB requires users to introduce a new technology to their backup environments. Why introduce a new technology that may offload your NICs but increases complexity and SAN load?

A better approach might be storage server snapshots. Your storage server likely already has snapshot capabilities, supporting many snapshots on different time frequencies. And snapshots can be restored instantly.

Another approach is tried-and-true agent-based backup. While there are valid concerns that agents create I/O bottlenecks that prevent the backup from completing during the backup window, in most instances servers are not anywhere near the point of overloaded I/O. Also, I’ve been poking around “next generation†backup solutions and I’m intrigued by what I see. Avamar and PureDisk, for example, offer solutions that use data deduplication technology in the virtual machine to reduce the size of backups before moving any data. While this may use a few CPU cycles, the impact is minimal and the benefits offered by backup agents, such as application integration, often outweigh the slight CPU load during off-hours.

What is right for your environment? There really isn’t one size that fits all, even within an organization. Virtual Iron provides SMEs with a range of choices. Click here for a paper that describes the pros and cons of different backup methods in a Virtual Iron environment.

It’s become abundantly clear that server virtualization is about more than cramming multiple systems onto one server. Consolidation only scratches the surface of what people want to do... there's better business continuity, automated power management, CPU and storage capacity management... the list goes on.

These things may sound easy, but they are actually really hard. For example:

• Making the virtualization easy to deploy - ideally when the hardware powers on it's ready and there's no command line configuration required.
• Integrated storage and network management.
• Support for asynchronous and concurrent operations so that both automated policies and administrators can control the environment without fear of stepping on each other.
• Fault tolerance with event rollback to handle failure events.
• User management through LDAP and Active Directory.
• A rich API that partners can build on.

The list goes on...

Many vendors like to talk about their ability to “manage virtual infrastructure,†but the fact is that other than VMware, Virtual Iron is the only solution that offers these capabilities.

In this blog I’ll use some examples to compare the difference between a complete solution like Virtual Iron versus an incomplete solution like Citrix XenServer. These are basic capabilities that we believe are minimum requirements for true virtual infrastructure management. In future blogs I’ll make similar comparisons to other imposters out there.

1. No Concurrent Operations: XenCenter has no support for object locking and concurrent operations, which means multiple users or policies can modify the same object at the same time. Simultaneous modification in a virtualization environment is as bad as it is in a file-system environment. This can create significant workflow issues and can corrupt the virtual environment.

As an example, imagine two XenCenter users edit the same Windows virtual machine in two XenCenter instances. In one XenCenter instance, the user changes the CPUs from 1 to 2, keeping all other values constant. In the other XenCenter instance the user changes the memory from 512 MB to 523 MB, keeping all other values constant. The user then checks the settings on both XenCenter instances. Whichever dialog was confirmed last overrides the settings of the first without any mention that two users were modifying the same information.

To compare, Virtual Iron locks resources that are being modified as you can see with the lock icons on win 2003 server below, preventing multiple users from conflicting on a shared resource.

2. No Auditability: XenCenter has no user accounts and does not persistently save what changed in the virtualized environment. This means it is impossible to track and record changes to the environment (i.e., who made what changes when). This makes auditing for root cause of failure or compliance impossible.

Note that the log of what was performed is amazingly sparse (i.e., Details: Settings saved). It doesn't tell you what settings were saved, or who performed the action because there are no users saved in the system. This level of reporting is insufficient for most compliance activities.

Second, if you exit XenCenter and re-enter, the information is ‘poof’, gone. Likewise, if you modify settings from another XenCenter client instance, you won't see those modifications logged in the first XenCenter instance. There is no support for multi-user management.

By contrast, in Virtual Iron, the user directory can be tied to Active Directory, OpenLDAP, or eDirectory.

3. No Failure Recovery: XenCenter has no concept of “jobs†(a job is like a database transaction that groups related actions). Without such a framework, there is no ability to roll back actions when a failure occurs.

4. No Automated Policies: XenCenter does not support functional virtualization use cases such as virtual machine restart in the event of failures or dynamic load balancing to satisfy resource requirements. It does not include a policy interface for users or integrators to add custom policies.

Virtual Iron, by contrast, has built-in policies like LiveCapacity that optimizes virtual machine performance and data center utilization by moving virtual machines when resource utilization is above a threshold. And LiveRecovery that ensures high availability of virtual machines without the need for clustering.

On the surface, many virtual infrastructure management checklists look similar. However, it’s important to scratch below the surface to make sure the product has the fundamental capabilities for your environment. Without the basics, virtual infrastructure management cannot support higher level capabilities like business continuity and load balancing that are essential to delivering the true benefits and ROI of server virtualization.

A lot of fingers have been typing about VDI (that's virtual desktop infrastructure) recently. If you're wondering what the fuss is about, the short answer is more than 50 million PCs were shipped last year, which makes it an interesting market for vendors and for organizations that are trying to manage these resources better. Some big players have made noise, such as Citrix (which already has a solution called Presentation Server, err, XenApp), Microsoft (ditto with Terminal Services) and VMware.

The basic concept of VDI is that there are a number of benefits in server virtualization that organizations would like in their desktop infrastructure. To name a few: simpler recovery from hardware failures, centralized management, security... So are there any organizations that are deploying VDI broadly?

In our experience, many organizations are placing desktop infrastructure in the data center for at least a subset of their total environment. We see a lot of Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp in our customer base. We're also seeing early evidence of VDI deployments. For smaller user environments, VDI can be as simple as deploying Windows Vista in a virtual machine and connecting using a thin client. We see this a lot in dev/test environments and smaller organizations.

As the environment scales, it's important to think about managability. Brokers can help organizations deploy and manage their virtual desktop infrastructure. I just read a blog over the weekend that describes how to deploy Virtual Iron and Provision Networks to create VDI. And there are other brokers that support Virtual Iron as well, such as 2X Software.

While you can't take your virtual desktop on the plane with you -- at least not yet -- think about VDI the next time your laptop or desktop experiences an issue. You can restore a backup to a virtual machine and be immediately productive. You may find that you don't want to go back.

CA recently sponsored a virtualization management study and made a summary of the survey results available here.

Download the PowerPoint overview and jump to slide #38 for a nice summary of the findings

The recording of our recent webcast with Intel is now available for on-demand viewing. You can watch it here.

JumpBox has released a PmWiki virtual appliance that works well with Virtual Iron.

PmWiki is a wiki-based system that allows for easy creation and editing of web pages -- either to look like "regular" pages or in wiki-format.

JumpBox offers a free download of PmWiki (and other virtual appliances) and you can also purchase through their website.

Byte and Switch has an article up discussing how "virtual environments share all the data protection requirements of their original physical counterparts, including SAN connectivity, and a growing number of suppliers aim to help."

The article also discusses recent announcements in the storage virtualization space.

eWeek's Channel Insider posted a very positive review of Virtual Iron 4.2:
Adopters will find setting up Virtual Iron straightforward; an included quick start guide speeds through the basic elements and offers valid recommendations when it comes to “networking†nodes and even covers basic concepts, such as network cabling. The idea here is to make it difficult for anyone who follows the documentation to muck up an installation.

and

Volumes could be written about the product's options and capabilities and most solution providers would be best off to download and experiment with a trial version of the product to make sure the feature mix will meet their needs. That aside, solution providers will find the product stable and should not come across any significant bugs.

Click here to read the full review.

The SearchCIO Newsletter features an article this week called "Server consolidation is still more physical than virtual." The major point of the article is that consolidation through virtualization is growing more common, but it still isn't as popular as physical consolidation.

I don't disagree with this. After all, it has been quoted that only about 5% of the virtualization market has been tapped, but certainly more consolidation is being done than just that 5% (consolidating two or three old servers onto newer ones, simply moving servers from multiple locations to a single location, etc.).

Of course, virtualization greatly helps with the consolidation process and can help you consolidate more. A sound consolidation plan would include both physical and virtual (see our Emanuel County School District case study for a good example of this).