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September 19, 2008
VMware Makes Computing New Again
And Helps Legitimize the Cloud
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As you no doubt are aware, VMware made news this week by announcing its Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) and vCloud initiatives. While these “cloudy” concepts might seem like science-fiction for old-school IT types, they are just a natural evolution for the crew on the cutting edge. (Note the “v” branding before every piece of this framework. VirtualCenter, the management interface, is now called vCenter.)
According to Reza Malekzadeh, VMware’s senior director of product marketing and alliances, VDC-OS is follows customer usage trends from consolidation to resource aggregation to -- once VMware started integrating management and automation features -- bigger, more on-demand uses. At this point, he says, the goal is complete abstraction between the application and the underlying infrastructure -- a goal being advanced rapidly through VMware’s partnerships with Cisco on the networking side, and various storage vendors. The end result is an IT framework enabling “unprecedented levels of flexibility.”
“Ultimately, at this level, what they’re telling us,” explains Malekzadeh, “is, ‘Look, what I’m interested in is running my app. Virtualization is great -- it’s a great enabler, it’s a nice platform. But what I really care about is making sure my SAP environment runs with these levels of performance, security and manageability, and I don’t really care, fundamentally, what the underlying hardware might be. I really need to make sure it runs.’”
However, in order to ensure wide applicability across a broad spectrum of users and application types, some improvements had to occur within VMware’s set of capabilities. Aside from the advanced work with storage and networking partners, the virtualization leader is making its own infrastructure-level improvements via drastically upgraded vCompute resources. In a VMworld keynote, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod said the company currently allows for individual VMs sporting four vCPUs, 64GB RAM and 100,000 IOPS, but hopes to bulk these numbers up to eight vCPUs, 256GB RAM and 200,000-plus IOPS. Herrod also noted an initiative to bring power management capabilities to these pools of distributed resources.
Malekzadeh says that while the ability to handle data-intensive applications initially was a ding against virtualized environments, VMware research shows that 80 percent of customers are running databases, middleware, or other such applications in their VMware environments. He concedes, however, that a VDC-OS might not be the best place to house your 3-D multiplayer video game.
Although he could not be specific about a timeframe, Malekzadeh says another goal is to let users overcome geographical boundaries by enabling vCenter to manage federated pools of virtual resources in multiple locations. Frank Gillett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says two other necessary improvements are support for multiple hypervisors and the ability to manage physical machines through the vCenter interface. The former probably is easier, he adds, while the latter likely will require close work with partners.
Easy or not, VMware doesn’t seem in any hurry to bring multiple-hypervisor support to vCenter in the near future. “At this point, it is strictly VMware, for two main reasons,” Malekzadeh explains. “The first one is we’re not getting customer demand to do otherwise. And the second one is if you go down the path of providing support for multiple virtualization formats, you’re basically bounding yourself to the lowest common denominator.” To illustrate what this would mean, he points to capabilities on Microsoft’s 2010 roadmap that have been available from VMware for four years.
Of course, Malekzadeh says, “I’d be extremely stupid and arrogant to say, ‘No, I’m not worried about Microsoft.’” But, he adds, VMware isn’t too worried because it provides not only great capabilities, but great value, as well. “We’re definitely not an open source company, but we’re an open technology company,” he says, noting that while there is a free tool for converting VMs to different formats, customers stick with ESX images.
Other capability improvements highlighted in Herrod’s keynote were: ConfigControl, Orchestrator, CapacityIQ, chargeback and AppSpeed for vCenter; the work with Cisco around vNetwork; and Virtual Machine File System, Storage VMotion, thin provisioning and linked clones for vStorage.
On to the Cloud
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