Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

The world does not revolve around VMWare!

You know VMware is the 800 lb Gorilla in hypervisors, but there are others, citrix xen, IBM Lpars, Hp Npars, Sun Zones, and Microsoft Hyper-v (stop laughing this is serious).

I am going to let you in on a little secret. The Hypervisor is a commodity. What you are paying for are the software services on top of them. Yes you can argue some have more bells and whistles in the hypervisor, scale differently, support different OS’s better than others, or are cheaper. What you are paying for is the right to buy the software add-ons.

It will be interesting to see how each differentiates from each other over the next year. Who will say performance matters and deliver on service level guarantees? Which one will be the most cloud-ish? Will you care?

I think you will care, but I believe the one that builds the most complete eco-system will win. I believe it is like email wars; exchange vs notes. Most companies use exchange. Not because it has more bells and whistles or is the best “all-in-one” product. But because it is a very effective email and calendaring system. Where Lotus Notes was trying to be everything collaborative … MS gave you the options to pick off the Chinese food menu at a reasonable price.

Same will happen with hypervisors. You’re going to have the “all in one” vs the one with features core to the hypervisor (performance / stability) …

I would say the one place MS and others have never done well is management beyond fault and event. So who will be the differentiator in this space? Will it be build or buy? Who will care that not all the workloads will live in virtualized / cloud environments … many with the label of “business critical”?

I believe you will be looking once again for “best of breed” products. Products that were not meant to be panaceas or “single-panes-of-glass” but never got implemented. In my time in the IT industry I have seen people buy five or more single-panes and still never achieve any benefit. Like in the storage industry you will probably buy your element/fault management from the vender and get the rest from innovative vendors outside those vendors.

Editorial Note:
Recently some of the aforementioned hypervisor vendors have been saying they will provide you everything for your data center an even cook you breakfast in the morning. Most call this the “cloud” strategy. Clouds where you use the “services” … think web services … available. Problem is that you will not be able to simply write to one API can move workloads between “clouds”. For clouds, cloud suppliers, and such to be successful this will need to become reality. Supplying underlying infrastructure services with no easy way to write to them is only part of what would be a dramatic game changer. This is not to say “private clouds” in our IT shops will work, but leveraging “public cloud providers” will be difficult.

July 6, 2009 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | 4 Comments 

comments

4 Responses to “The world does not revolve around VMWare!”

  1. Jonathan on July 7th, 2009

    I’m sure the content of this report is worth while, except it’s hard to read with the amount of spelling and grammer mistakes… could you not have proof read it before publishing??

  2. Rob Strechay on July 7th, 2009

    Did check … maybe the problem with posting on holiday … moved some stuff a round content wise – check it out now

  3. Rick on July 7th, 2009

    The hypervisor is anything but a commodity right now, just like it is not a “feature” like some companies that produce them think it is. It may be a “feature” to their platform, but hypervisors that install without an OS underneath them are true cloud operating systems.

    Your 5th paragraph says it all and I would agree with you 100% but it defines what VMware has to offer today.

  4. Rob Strechay on July 7th, 2009

    Hey Rick – my point on commodity was it is free … be it ESXi or W2K8 R2 … putting two (or more) servers per physical is commodity and picking the hypervisor you use is based more on the “extras” … I agree that hypervisor is the cloud OS … thanks for sharing your thoughts …

Leave a Reply