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June 02, 2008
Does B-hive Acquisition Make VMware a Cloud Vendor?
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They say it's dangerous to speak in terms of certainties, to take a "black or white" view of the world. Here's one that should be safe, though: VMware is the leader in the enterprise server virtualization market. Its acquisition of B-hive Networks doesn't change that, but it could widen the gap between VMware and the rest of the virtualization pack, as B-hive's Conductor technology will allow VMware to target higher-end, more mission-critical applications, as well as users looking to seriously step up service levels.
According to VMware CTO Stephen Herrod, the company is intent on making VMware environments the best place to run high-end, complex applications, and B-hive’s technology immediately helps them do just that. A virtual appliance that sits outside the software stack, Conductor works across different operating systems and machines, and provides detailed information on application performance -- something Herrod says has been “one of the critical factors that people have looked to as they get higher- and higher-end applications running on VMware infrastructure.”
To put it simply, Herrod says that Conductor is able to “think at the level that applications that at,” as opposed to thinking at an infrastructure level. Whereas most of VMware's measurement tools focus on machine metrics like CPU MHz or RAM usage, B-hive’s tool is able to, for example, recognize what it looks like to report a Web page and what it looks like when a Web page is returned to a user, and can then report on the average time to provide a page. And it is just as proficient looking into more complex, multi-tier applications, says Herrod.
This application-level insight is increasingly vital to VMware users, many of whom are implementing “VMware first” initiatives. Large companies in particular, says Herrod, are putting all of their apps in virtual environments, and they are not hesitant about requesting more support in terms of performance tracking when they migrate mission-critical applications to VMware. “From our standpoint,” he says, “we saw a way to do performance better than it’s done on physical systems, so we see it as another driver for people to bring new applications into their systems.”
“We’re 100 percent serious about making VMware the best place to run mission-critical applications,” Staten stated. “And to the extent we make those easier to manage and more available and more secure than when they’re running natively, that’s absolutely our strategy -- and this is one of the pillars in doing that.”
James Staten, principal analyst with Forrester Research, lauds another feature of B-hive’s Conductor -- its ability to map dependencies among different VMs that make up a business process. Calling dependency mapping the biggest problem with high availability, Staten says “you may do HA services or clustering or fast re-start for a particular application, but usually a business process involves multiple applications, and not knowing what those dependencies are is problematic.”
Automation is the Future
But these capabilities are just the beginning: B-hive’s technology also allows VMware to significantly advance its plans around automated, policy-based resource allocation, which it refers to as “remediation.” Herrod says the company definitely sees the combination of Conductor and VMware’s current suite of products allowing for this type of functionality, where the tool will be able to measure which parts of a complex application are keeping from peak performance and then adapt resources on the fly to address those problem spots. “It’s recognizing where the bottleneck is, and then using the nice, flexible features of virtualization to attack those,” Herrod said, adding that the ideal implementation of this technology essentially will be a “closed loop of performance monitoring and remediation.”
Forrester’s Staten agrees that the ability of B-hive's tool to tell the load balancer what to do is “very valuable,” but notes that automation on this level is far beyond what most virtualization users would be able to digest at this point. “What we see in virtual environments is they're going up the maturity curve, where we have a large number of customers who are starting to make the move from tactically trying it out to strategically implementing it,” he explained. “And they’re not yet, even in the strategically implementing it phase, ready to start automating it.”
The key, Staten believes, is for VMware to make its automation tools ready before users get to that point so they can start learning about and trusting the tools. B-hive was experiencing some early success, he said, but “putting this into [VMware] VirtualCenter will make it possible for a lot more customers to start learning about and getting familiar with automation and actually using it.” In addition, he says, the promise of added support and certification, as well as the presence of VMware's large R&D team, will add a level of comfort for prospective users.
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