ITs Virtually There

It was evident from VMWorld 2007 that virtualization has gone mainstream in

enterprise computing. Virtualization deals with the abstraction of hardware and

software resources in a computing environment. The nine year old company, Palo

Alto-based VMware, attracted nearly 11,000 people and scores of partners at

VMWorld 2007 in September, a month after it went public. VMwares IPO was a

spectacular success in stock market terms. And in her keynote, Diane Greene,

president and CEO, VMware called it the IPO of the virtualization industry

rather than VMware alone, and recanted its potential to work a revolution in

computing architecture.

Diane Greene prides herself on VMwares role in building out the

virtualization industry, which is now getting competitive. It is more than

hypervisor wars, and Greene asserts that the hypervisor does not alone

constitute the virtualization infrastructure. VMwares success has been built on

what virtualization can do and the various applications thereof, she added.

Greene continued: Hardware is increasingly going to be delivered

virtualization-enabled with a hypervisor pre-installed, and it can be up and

running with virtualization in under two minutes. The hypervisor sits right on

top of the hardware. A lot of times a hypervisor is seen as being in the same

class as the operating system. But the operating system does far more than the

hypervisorit manages the applications for the end user. The hypervisor just

manages the resources, and the virtual infrastructure aggregates those resources

and provides reliability and responsiveness for the software running in virtual

machines.

For VMware, the hypervisor makes up just about 20% of revenues and the rest

comes from products that help exploit the power of virtualization. The

successful IPO whereby VMwares parent EMC Corp floated 10% of its equity public

was designed to raise cash to support VMwares growth.

The Industry Rallies Around



Hardware vendors like Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens and NEC have endorsed

VMwares new hypervisor. Both AMD and Intel exhibited their support in evidence

of virtualization being the clear direction that enterprise computing is headed

towards.

Hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping ESX Server 3i within their

products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. Pat Gelsinger, senior

VP, Digital Enterprise System, Intel, said in a keynote, Virtualization

disaggregates the OSit helps build a new data center operating system.

Other announcements centered around new product introductions in the

virtualization infrastructure like virtual desktop, automation of disaster

recovery, data centers, and virtual appliances.

The virtual machine is the new desktop platformits both a PC and a file, if you will

IDCs forecast for worldwide server virtualization looks promising. In terms

of percentage of servers shipped with virtualization capabilities, the number

has steadily grown from 5% in 2005 and is expected to touch 17% in 2010.

Saving on capital expenditure was the original reason for companies to take

up virtualization. When VMware started 10 years back the industry was in a phase

of massive hardware deployment and virtualization was one of the ways to keep up

with compute capacity without proportional increase in server overheads. Such of

those who didnt embrace virtualization experienced rapid growth in the number

of servers spread across the organization and needed to consolidate the servers.

Server consolidation thus became the driving factor for growth of

virtualization. VMware believes that business continuity, virtual appliances,

desktop management, and the need to rapidly provision new applications are some

of the new drivers for the virtualization trend.

The broad value proposition for virtualization is therefore four-fold:

improve server utilization, reduce/contain the number of servers, improve

business continuity and disaster recovery efforts, and lower data center

operational expenses.

On the Desktop



The hypervisor or ESX Server gives the power to manage desktops on the

backend through a virtual machine called the virtual desktop. The virtual

desktop can reside on a device with any form factor. Said Jerry Chen, senior

director, Enterprise Desktops, VMware, The virtual machine is the new desktop

platformits both a PC and a file, if you will. Virtual desktops have already

reached significant installed base: about 500 mn in enterprises and 350 mn in

consumers. The advantages of virtual desktops stem from the fact that they are

hardware independent, can be isolated and are, therefore, inherently secure, and

can be moved around like a file. There are two types of products: individually

administered desktops and managed desktops. VMware has products in both

categories. Notably, its Virtual Desktop Manager 2.0 is more than a managed

desktop in that it also functions as a connection broker managing connections

from remote clients to hosted desktops.

We are in the process of virtualizing 21,000 desktops using VMware VDI,

said Tom Petry, director of technology at the District School Board of Collier

County in a press communication. We have seen firsthand the manageability and

control VDI brings to a desktop computing environment; including the security

and business continuity benefits of centralizing our desktop infrastructure in

our world class data centersno small thing in hurricane country.

IDC estimates the market opportunity for virtual desktops to be $2 bn by

2011. We feel virtual machines for desktop computing is one of the most

exciting developments within the technology industry in recent years, said

IDCs John Humphreys. We see significant opportunity for organizations to

improve the efficiency with which they provide computing resources through the

use of virtualized client computing technologies. With a solution like VDI,

organizations have an alternative that not only provides a familiar user

experience, but also helps to centralize desktops and improve data security and

user productivity.

Automating DR



At the event, VMware also announced VMware Site Recovery Manager, a new

product for disaster recovery automation. In a conference call prior to the

event, Raghu Raghuram, VP, Products and Solutions, VMware said Disaster

recovery is one of the key factors driving customer adoption and standardization

on the VMware Infrastructure platform. VMware Site Recovery Manager introduces

disaster recovery automation and management capabilities to reduce the risk,

cost and complexity of organizations disaster recovery plans. Growing

awareness of the business consequences of data center outages and regulations

including SOX and HIPAA that mandate disaster recovery are helping to raise

awareness of the importance and preparation required to ensure successful

recovery. VMware and its storage partners including EMC, EqualLogic, Hitachi

Data Systems, HP, IBM, Lefthand Networks and Network Appliance are working to

support the use of leading storage replication capabilities with VMware Site

Recovery Manager.

After VMWorld 2007



In the days following VMWorld 2007, VMware announced a new hardware

certification program for storage virtualization devices. Combined with the

virtualization-enabling technologies in VMware ESX Server, this program is

designed to enable customers to have more choice in deploying virtualized

storage solutions with VMware Infrastructure. In a bid to cascade the benefits

of virtualization down to smaller organizations the company announced three new

VMware Infrastructure product packages tailored for SMBs in October. Most

recently, the company also unveiled VMware Server 2, the next generation

virtualization product which is free to use.

Ed Nair





mail@dqindia.com



The author is based in San Francisco